A £15 million manor house that’s been transformed into as grand a home as you’ll find in the Cotswolds

What’s the best way to bring a period house up to date? It’s a question we’ve been musing on a lot at Country Life of late, thanks to two homes in particular. One is Ripple Hall, whose interiors have been transformed into an ethereal white space, the sort of home you can image Kate Bush dancing through in a 1980s pop video. The other is No 61 Colebrooke Row, a townhouse that’s been stripped back to its original fabric in a stark, brave, and yet undeniably striking way.

Fascinating as those extremes are, we can’t pretend that it isn’t somehow comforting to turn our attention to a house that treads the middle ground: the beautiful, Grade II-listed Foxcote Manor, in the east of the Cotswolds, not far off the A40 near Cheltenham. It’s being sold by joint agents Peter Edwards of Knight Frank and Edward Sugden of Savills at £15 million.

Foxcote sits centrally within its 60 acres of delightful gardens, woodland and pasture near a village called Andoversford. The current owners bought it in 2019, when it was on sale for £8 million (and featured in Country Life, naturally). That’s quite the price bump, of course, but there has been a wholesale renovation and expansion of the entire property in a completely different style. These pictures comparing the house then and now gives an idea of the new philosophy:

Image 1 of 2

The manor and its grounds occupy the south side of a valley formed by a tributary of the River Coln, which flows through nearby Withington, six miles from Cheltenham and 13 from Stow-on-the-Wold.

In the Middle Ages, it was part of the Bishop of Worcester’s Withington estate, which was acquired by the college of Westbury-on-Trym in 1507. After the Dissolution, the Crown sold Foxcote with the college’s other lands to Sir Ralph Sadler, after which it passed through several families until, in 1919, Foxcote Manor Farm was acquired by Emma Abell.

In 1973, the Abells, who had added glebe land bought from the rector in 1921 and the former glebe Thorndale Farm in 1932, sold the Foxcote estate to the Hon Mark Vestey, a former crack polo player who never let paralysis after a hunting accident prevent his wholehearted enjoyment of fieldsports.

Vestey, who died in 2016, further enlarged the estate with the purchase of two local farms and parts of Withington Manor Farm and, by 1998, owned some 1,000 acres in the parish.

He extended the manor house, adding a flanking gable wing on the south side of the house, which matches the wing to the north added by the Abells in about 1920. Other additions from 1997–98 include a north bay window, a south loggia and a Classical porch, followed sometime after 1980 by the conversion of Foxcote’s splendid tithe barn into a billiard room, squash court and famous party barn, using windows from a demolished service wing at Vestey’s brother Sam’s Stowell Park near Northleach.

According to its Historic England listing, the manor house at Foxcote dates from the late 17th century and was originally built on an L-shaped plan. Although little changed structurally, the picture it now presents is quite different to the one that greeted the current vendors seven years ago.

Gone is the covering of ivy that graced the front façade to reveal the honey-coloured Cotswold stone walls beneath; inside, traditional interiors, furniture and furnishings have been replaced throughout by pale, cream-coloured walls with furniture and fittings in a cheerful mix of mainly blue and white.

In total, the new-look Foxcote Manor offers some 13,000sq ft of light and airy accommodation on three floors.

On the ground floor, a hall, three elegant reception rooms, a snug/television room, a double-height kitchen/breakfast/living room, various utilities, a boot room, gun room and office.

There is a sumptuous principal bedroom suite, plus two guest suites, five further bedrooms and three more bathrooms on the first and second floors.

Image 1 of 3

Additional accommodation is provided in the three-bedroom gate lodge.

Outbuildings include the party barn, stable courtyard and coach house, plus a range of farm buildings and stores.