The singer Madonna, a medical herbalist in Bath and a retired art teacher from Bedfordshire have one thing in common — and it’s not esoteric beliefs or building nurseries for African children. They have all fallen in love with Georgian houses.
Madonna has a £7.5 million home in Marylebone, Central London’s “Georgian village”. She liked it so much that last year she bought another in Regent’s Park for £1.6 million on behalf of the Kabbalah Trust, which promotes the mystic Jewish teaching she espouses. Ruth Daniels works as a medical herbalist when she is not busy restoring to its former splendour her neglected Georgian gem in Bath, near the Assembly Rooms. And David Roe, a retired art teacher, has just sold his Grade II listed, 1797 classic red-brick Georgian pile in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, for £850,000; he did so through The Georgian House, the Georgian Group’s very own estate agency, established in September.
Michael Bidnell, the Georgian Group’s research officer, says: “The Georgian House came about because people who were looking to buy a Georgian house kept contacting us and asking if there was an estate agency we could recommend. We thought that if we could help them we could help to make sure that the right sort of people were getting into Georgian houses.”
There is much talk of the “right sort of people” among Georgian house fans. It’s almost as if these elegant and charming houses are thinking, feeling, refined individuals themselves. To pass one on to someone who might rip out the window frames or paint a room shocking pink would be like abandoning an aged relative.
It was this desire to sell to someone who “understood” his home of 30 years that attracted David Roe to The Georgian House. “I had floated the house locally,” he says. “But really, it was the wrong sort of people who came to look. I needed people sympathetic to the house, not people who were after a stainless steel kitchen.”
The Georgian House deals exclusively with houses and apartments dating from the Georgian period, defined broadly as 1700 to 1837. It provides a full historical report on each property for prospective buyers and charges a reasonable commission of 1.25 per cent for sole agency. At least half of that goes directly to the Georgian Group. The Georgian House valued Roe’s property, Gates House, at the same sum as two local agents. The first person they brought to look around bought it. And paid cash.
The money raised from the commission is used to help to restore neglected buildings nominated by the group. So far the agency has sold one house and has three more on its books. It is run by Albert Hill and Matt Gibberd, who also set up The Modern House estate agents, which specialises in fine 20th and 21st-century houses.
Julian D’Arcy, head of the Knight Frank agency in the North of England, says that wealthy buyers won’t look at a house in rural Yorkshire unless it’s Georgian. And that’s not all, as January bonus time approaches in the City, good Georgian homes are likely to be on the shopping lists of banking types too.
So what’s so great about Georgian houses that they now need their own estate agent? “The Georgian style of architecture is now, more than ever, perceived as the epitome of good taste,” Bidnell says. “Georgian houses were built to last and provide flexible, well-lit living space. Often, deceptively narrow frontages can conceal large interior spaces, reinforced by high ceilings and tall windows. Separate basement entrances are useful for providing self-contained accommodation or easy access for push-chairs and bicycles.”
Indeed, Georgian is such an easy architectural style to replicate that it has become a prevailing pastiche in new housing developments. We have all seen, however, what UPVC windows and plastic front doors can do for the elegant proportions of the pure Georgian look.
Savills sponsors the Georgian Group Architectural Awards, which gives prizes for the best new buildings in a Georgian context and in the Classical tradition. This year the winners were the Garden Pavilion at Broughton Hall, Skipton, North Yorkshire, designed by Sir Michael Hopkins, a pioneer of high-tech architecture, and a private Catholic chapel in the North of England by the Powys-based Craig Hamilton Architects.
Although not quite as grand, Ruth Daniels’s house has had its big moment. It appears in ITV1’s forthcoming adaptation of Persuasion, starring Rupert Penry-Jones as Jane Austen’s hero, Captain Wentworth. An upstairs room became a sitting room for the scene in which the heroine, Anne Elliot (played by Sally Hawkins), visits Mrs Smith, an invalid who has fallen on hard times. “The film crew decorated the room with a Regency stripe and then distressed it with what looked like cold tea,” Mrs Daniels says.
This five-storey house, which took Mrs Daniels, 57, and her husband, David, two years to track down, is proof that Georgian diamonds can still be unearthed. And there are enclaves to be found away from honeypots like Cheltenham. In the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, for instance, Upgate House, a three-bed Georgian house in the town centre, is on the market for £325,000, and comes with a 29ft drawing room and a kitchen with a log-burning stove.
For more than two hundred years Mrs Daniels’s new home was a lodging house, originally let to visitors taking the waters in Bath. Then social services moved in, and this year the council decided to sell the battered old building via a local estate agent and sealed bids.
“This was always going to be the house where we would spend the rest of our lives,” Mrs Daniels says. “And I am totally dedicated to returning it to the way it would have been in the 18th century. The Georgian Group has a wonderful, free advice service and has been a tremendous help. In the basement I’m going to have a modern kitchen with an Aga but, behind that, another kitchen, exactly as it would have been two hundred years ago.” Crazy? That’s what love can do.
Upgate House, Louth, Halifax estate agents, www.rightmove.co.uk, 084540 20931.
The Modern House, www.themodernhouse.net, 08456 344068.
The Seven Deadly Sins: 1 plastic windows; 2 cables or wires through cornices; 3 satellite dishes; 4 removal of historic fabric; 5 cement pointing (should be lime); 6 painted brick or stone; 7 gardens turned into car parks.
Where to unearth a Georgian gem: Newcastle, city centre and quayside; Liverpool, city centre around Rodney Street and Toxteth; Leamington Spa; Carlisle; Louth; Exeter; Hackney, North London; and Bow, East London.
Useful sites: The Georgian Group, 020- 7529 8928. www.georgiangroup.org.uk; The group’s estate agency, 08456 344069, www.thegeorgianhouse.net.
