Quintessential Cotswolds

The market in this delightful corner of England is as robust as ever

- Penny Churchill

AFTER 30 happy years with Savills, Lindsay Cuthill (07967 555545) has joined the ranks of the Cotswold independents with the foundation of his Blue Book Agency on home soil at Horton, on the Cotswold escarpment three miles from Chipping Sodbury, a stone’s throw from Badminton. He has hit the ground running with the launch onto the open market, for the first time in 30 years, of illustrious Lyegrove House near Badminton, a classic, Grade II*listed Cotswold country house set in 18½ acres of famous formal and walled gardens and surrounded by the lush pastures and woodland of the 52,000-acre Badminton estate, of which it was once a part. A guide price of £12.5 million is quoted for Lyegrove, which first appears as an estate in its own right in 1461, when it was held by John and Alice Codrington.

The present house was built in the early 17th century, extended in the 18th century and further altered in the 19th century. Bought as a dower house by the Duke of Beaufort in the early 1900s, it was sold by the 9th Duke to the Earl and Countess of Westmoreland in 1926. According to an article in COUNTRY LIFE (December 14, 1929) ‘when the Countess of Westmoreland took the house in hand it had lost most of its original character, but presented great possibilities to an architect of imagination. The fullest advantage of these has been taken by Mr G. H. Kitchin, who has helped the Countess in laying out the gardens and has given the interior of the house a charm and interest which it never possessed before’.