An Englysh Idyll

Hinchwick Manor is like a dream of England. Trough the arch of a gatehouse, we see a courtyard and, beyond, a fine-looking house in honey-coloured stone, with grand Jacobean proportions, mullioned windows and strikingly tall chimney stacks.

Tucked away in a secluded Gloucestershire valley, Hinchwick is “its own world – when you’re there, you can’t see anything outside of it”, says someone who grew up in this idyllic setting: a member of the Asquith family, descendants of the leading statesman of Britain’s Edwardian era, who have owned Hinchwick since the 1980s. Yet this house, its estate and working farms lie in the beating heart of the Cotswolds – within easy striking distance of Cheltenham and Cirencester, and five miles or so from the iconic villages of Stow-on-the-Wold and Moreton-in-Marsh (which has direct trains to London).

As Crispin Holborow, country director, Savills Private Office, says: “Hinchwick Manor Estate is in the absolute sweet spot for anyone looking to live in the north Cotswolds. The manor and the surrounding landscape – with its wonderful rolling hills and belts of mature woodland – provide a timeless backdrop in an A1 location.”

Much has been said about how “cool” the Cotswolds have become – with smart private members’ clubs and hotels, and an enviable foodie scene characterised by artisan bakers and the kind of cosy village pub that serves English charcuterie and a choice of pudding wines. But there is also an innate nostalgia to our love of the Cotswolds, the region that spans the counties of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, and spreads into Wiltshire, Somerset, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Its ancient landscape of rolling hills and winding country lanes is dotted with handsome market towns and villages, all of it – from fine old churches and former coaching inns to country houses large and small – in that lovely Cotswold stone.

Technically, this is oolitic limestone, but the Cotswolds bring out the poetic in people. Witness JB Priestley in his 1934 travelogue English Journey. “The truth is that it has no colour that can be described,” he wrote (although “honey-coloured” is the conventional description). “Even when the sun is obscured and the light is cold, these walls are still faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them.” And when the sun is out on a summer’s day, well, what’s not to love?

For many of us, then, Hinchwick Manor – not palatial in scale, but still substantial – represents a particular kind of ideal. This is is a “gentleman’s farmhouse”, according to its Grade II heritage listing, and its attractions feel timeless, from views along what is effectively your own valley to the crunch of gravel underfoot as you approach the house through a courtyard framed by an octagonal cluster of outbuildings.

Likewise, the larger estate of farmland and woods speaks powerfully of the glimmering centuries Priestley summoned to mind. In this bucolic setting are an Iron Age hillfort, a medieval boundary stone and the parish church of St Nicholas, Condicote, dating back to Norman times. Yet the house was an exercise in romantic nostalgia even when it was built – 200 years ago, during the Industrial Revolution, in an architectural style that harked back another two centuries to the Jacobean era.

Hinchwick as we see it today is essentially the creation of one family: the Cockerells, descendants of the diarist Samuel Pepys. At the turn of the 19th century, they were wealthy “nabobs” – Regency slang for those young men who went o to India to work for the East India Company and returned, often with their health broken, but with their fortunes made. Colonel John Cockerell bought the neighbouring Sezincote estate in 1795; on inheriting it, John’s younger brother, Sir Charles Cockerell, commissioned a third brother, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, to rebuild Sezincote in IndoMughal style, using local stone stained to imitate the red sandstone of many Indian palaces. Then, having acquired neighbouring Hinchwick – which would remain part of the Sezincote estate until the 1920s – Sir Charles commissioned Samuel’s son Charles to build a new manor house there.

Charles Robert Cockerell was a dashing figure – an intrepid traveller, classicist and archaeologist, newly returned from his extensive travels around Greece and Egypt, then Florence and Rome, where his smart circle had included the artists Canova and Ingres. Some of his discoveries are now in the British Museum, and he went on to be a successful architect and a Royal Academician – the RA memorialised him on his death in 1863, praising his understanding of “the power of the antique to fire the imagination”.

At Hinchwick, he drew inspiration from a vision of a long-vanished England: hence those splendid Jacobean flourishes, now tempered by two centuries of English weather. In the 1930s, Hinchwick’s new owners, the Pilkingtons (of glassmaking fame), made additions in honey-coloured Cotswold stone – naturally – and in a suitably nostalgic Arts and Crafts style.

With its attics and outhouses, including the vast refurbished barn, now used for family occasions and parties, Hinchwick was “a wonderful place for playing hideand-seek as children”, recalls the family member, of the changes made by the late Stephen Asquith, who inherited the estate via a great-aunt who had married a Pilkington. “I remember us playing with the bells [formerly used to summon servants]. But my father set out to make it more comfortable by creating large rooms out of a warren of smaller ones.”

Thus, behind Charles Cockerell’s splendid façade, there lies a comfortable family home designed for 21st-century countryhouse living – from a capacious kitchen and a breakfast room to the three spacious bedroom suites on the first floor. Above that are a further seven bedrooms and two bathrooms, roomy enough, surely, for even the most extended of families. A dream of England, perhaps, but in reality an eminently liveable one.

Hinchwick Manor and Estate, including four cottages, farmstead, arable and pasture farmland and woodland, is available as a whole with a guide price of £21.65 million or in three separate lots.

This story also appears in the new Portfolio magazine. Request your complimentary copy here.

CRISPIN HOLBOROW, COUNTRY DIRECTOR, PRIVATE OFFICE, SAVILLS COUNTRY HOUSE DEPARTMENT
cholborow@savills.com