Tasteful friends: Dorset, England, a large apartment in an 1842 Tudor style country house, £1.5M
"Substantial portion of impressive listed Grade II mansion about 5 miles from the County town of Dorchester" with 4746 square feet in the main house, plus separate gym, summer house (outbuilding), 2-car garage, and a pavilion. Includes private garden and communal amenities: shared gardens, basement storage and wine cellars, parking. There are 4 bedrooms, 4 baths, and 1 w/c.
The apartment occupies a big, cherry-picked chunk of the original core of the house and was created in the 1980s when the single family house was converted. It includes the original entrance, reception hall, and main stair hall, handsome paneled study, modern kitchen, plus large dining and drawing rooms. The upper (first) floor has 4 en suite bedrooms with nice views. A two-car garage, rooms, 4 en suite bedrooms. Many divisions of country houses into apartments do not fare nearly so well, often carving up a house into awkward sections and leaving something that feels much more like a (badly designed) apartment than a house within a house. This example, though, really does give the sense of a self-contained house complete in itself, and the lovely, large rooms are very nicely finished. It's the rare case of the country house apartment that still has the feel of a country house, not just a butchered corner of one.
It is a 2.5 hour train trip to central London from nearby Dorchester (5 mi.), the county seat of 20,000 people and the former home of Thomas Hardy.
| by Anonymous | reply 6 | June 23, 2022 7:20 AM
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Beautiful spaces, especially on the main floor.
| by Anonymous | reply 1 | June 22, 2022 11:43 PM
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It's lovely! I was looking at (much smaller) mansion flats before I decided I wanted more privacy and my own garden and bought a terraced cottage instead. The mansion flats are still very appealing, though. Plus Dorset is a lovely county!
| by Anonymous | reply 2 | June 22, 2022 11:49 PM
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I’d like to know how many other units there are. I feel like this is the worst of both worlds - you’re sharing, but not with enough other people/families to make it feel anonymous. One bad apple and you’ve got a fucking disaster on your hands.
But I’ve never even visited a place like this, much less lived in one, so I really have no idea. It is a beautiful apartment and gorgeous grounds and setting.
| by Anonymous | reply 3 | June 23, 2022 12:05 AM
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Magnificent. But its really just a townhouse if you are sharing with 2 other families.
| by Anonymous | reply 4 | June 23, 2022 1:08 AM
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For the same price you can get a freestanding historic house on a nice property with roughly the same number of rooms - the same but quite different.
This is the better of the two historic houses in Dorset within £100,000 in price and with 4 bedrooms or more that seemed roughly comparable. It's a beautiful house, a beautiful series of gardens, a very comfortable and lively space, but it has its own drawbacks. Unlike comparable houses, this stone village house doesn't front directly on the street curbside; it has enough setback for some privacy. Like the other houses it's cottagey: cozy, quirky, smaller rooms, lower ceilings, a lower quality of modern finishes in baths and kitchen and the modern addition (a weak point.) It's still very nice and has its appeal, not least that the whole house stands on its own; it's not "a vertical townhouse" created from the division of a country house into separate units with a mix of owned and shared (and large) gardens. There is no prospect of hurt feelings over communal gardens over who gets what group of wine lockers in the cellar.
But there's also not the architecture. The stand alone houses are cozier, more villagey, no huge rooms and high ceilings and vast windows and splendid architectural details that come with having a prize chunk of a very good country house. Buying the equivalent single-family country house is a different story in terms of money, maintenance, and sheer size -- houses with the level of architectural space and detail tend not to be 4 bedrooms, but 11, plus a range of service rooms or a stables and other separate buildings to tend to even when you're not there. Very different things.
This one struck me because it's such a good example if a division of a country house that makes sense, still feels like a country house, and goes a long way to providing privacy.
| by Anonymous | reply 5 | June 23, 2022 6:34 AM
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