In all, more than a dozen estates were sold for more than £10m in 2010, with Knight Frank and Savills generally sharing the spoils. Contracts were exchanged in March on Kiddington Hall, with its core buildings and surrounding 466 acres of land, at about £15m-the rest of the estate was sold to a single buyer. Meanwhile, Strutt & Parker tied up the loose ends on the biggest estate sale since Easton Neston-that of the prestigious, 2,050-acre Kiddington estate near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which came to the market in September 2009 at a guide price of £42m for the whole. The response was electric, and Chadacre sold within four weeks for an estimated 60% more than the asking price. For centuries the seat of the Plampin family and later of London banker Thomas Hallifax, the 680-acre property is the epitome of a grand English country estate, with a magnificently restored Regency hall, surrounded by gardens, parkland, estate farmhouses and cottages, farmland and sporting woodlands. Savills set the pace for the UK estates market in mid-March with the launch onto the market of the peerless Chadacre estate near Long Melford, Suffolk, at a guide price of ‘excess £10m’. Throughout 2010, landowners, farmers and investors alike kept their eyes on the eastern counties, where land values continue to outperform the national average. And the classic Regency Clermont Hall at Little Cressingham in Breckland, south Norfolk, sold quickly following its launch in mid September for more than its £1.85m guide price, after years of painstaking restoration by the late Philip Jones, the talented, but little-publicised, abstract painter. The picturesque, Victorian- Gothic Grange at Little Plumstead, east of Norwich-former home of the late Bennett Oates, an oil painter renowned for his classic flower studies-was successfully offered in May at a guide price of £3m. And Louis de Soissons of Savills in Norwich scored 10 out of 10 for artistic merit with the sale of two fine houses previously owned by well-known painters. Savills launched Worlingham Hall, with a secondary house and 100 acres of parkland near Beccles, Suffolk, on the market in early March with a guide price of £3.9m for the whole a buyer was signed up by June. The big guns were also out early in East Anglia. It went to a buyer with strong City connections, and, reputedly, for more than its £9.25 million guide price. Knight Frank and Savills both report a late surge in the sale of high-value properties, suggesting that those elusive City buyers may at last be emerging from the shadows.Īt the upper end of the country house market, where access to mortgage finance is rarely a major problem, sales were hampered earlier in the year by ‘a conspicuous lack of realignment’ between the aspirations of vendors and those of buyers, with vendors of high-value properties quoting prices at levels ‘between 30% and 40% above reality’, says Edward Sugden of buying agents Property Vision.īut that didn’t prevent a handful of exceptional properties being sold in the autumn, among them Heads Farm, racehorse trainer Charles Egerton’s splendid 703-acre estate at Chaddleworth on the Berkshire Downs, through Fisher German and Knight Frank.
Country Life's Top 100 architects, builders, designers and gardenersĮven the dearth of ‘trophy’ house and estate sales, a significant feature of 2010, appears to have been reversed in recent weeks.
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