Foscote or Foscott is a small hamlet to the north east of Buckingham. The manor is described by Pevsner and we have summarised the details below.
In 1639 Edward Grenville acquired the property and Sheahan thinks it was he who built the house. It is described as a 'large square building of stone'. In 1868 north west extensions were added with the south east front being remodelled in 1988-9. The front is Jacobean in design.
The north east front is 17th century with a rebuilt 17th century porch.
There is an interesting article about the property available here from The Sunday Times April 19, 2009:
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'When it first came to the market early last year, Foscote Manor was priced at £8m. Twelve months later, would-be buyers can pick up the property for half that sum: the Grade II-listed Jacobean spread, just outside Buckingham, has been reduced, for the third time, to £4m.
The house, which dates from the 17th century, has eight reception rooms, including a billiard room and library, and seven bedrooms, three of which are suites. Outside is a walled garden, swimming pool, tennis court, three cottages and a stable yard, all set in 39 acres of rolling parkland, complete with a lake. Greg Heywood, a buy-to-let entrepreneur who at one stage owned 150 properties, worth £53m, bought the house in 2006 for £5m.
“We have set a date – Monday, April 27 – for submission of expressions of serious interest,” says James Crawford, in charge of selling the property for the agent Knight Frank. “We have quoted a competitive guide price with a clear determination to sell, and it looks remarkably good value at that level.”
So, what’s wrong with it? Well, there are a few obvious drawbacks: electricity pylons in view of the house, what appears to be a public footpath running through the middle of the property, and uncomfortably close neighbours to the rear, just behind the stable yard (“You could have complete strangers within 4ft of you when you bring your horse out,” says one person who has visited the house).
The real explanation may be simpler: property-market sources suggest that the house has been repossessed – even though Crawford refuses to confirm or deny this, saying merely it is “in the market to be sold”. Bank of Scotland, shown in Land Registry records to have had a charge on the property, also declined to comment.
Foscote is not the only country pile to have had its price dramatically slashed over the past year. While the traditional spring market is only now slowly beginning to swing into action, those who want an early start could do worse than look at some of last year’s offerings, many of which have been substantially reduced.
Take Winslow Hall. A beautiful house designed by Christopher Wren house with 22 acres in Buckinghamshire, it was viewed 18 months ago by Tony and Cherie Blair when it first came to the market for £3m. Now the price has been cut by a third, to £2m (01295 228000, savills.co.uk). Chequers Manor, another property viewed by the Blairs (five times, in fact, before they eventually plumped for the £4m, seven-bedroom, Grade I-listed former home of the actor John Gielgud, also in Buckinghamshire), had its price slashed six months ago, from £4 to £3.5m (DBA; 01494 717172).
Or how about Beeding Court? A Grade II-listed medieval hall house on the banks of the River Adur in West Sussex, it has been reduced by 28%, from £1.65m to £1.195m (01403 264444, kingchasemorecountrywide.co.uk). Aldwick Manor, in Hertfordshire, came to the market at £3.95m, but has been reduced by £1m (01582 764343, struttand parker.com).
Then there’s Hunton Manor in Hampshire. This 10-bedroom Grade II-listed house, set in just under 18 acres, is now for sale at £7m, having previously been offered at £9m (020 7409 8823, savills.co.uk). And Copt Hewick Hall, a pretty estate in 86 acres, near Ripon in North Yorkshire, recently reduced from £7m to £5.5m (01423 561274, struttandparker.com). A little further north, in Northumberland, Felton Park Hall first came to the market last June for £2.5m; if you wanted it today, it would cost £1.95m (01434 632404, www.smiths gore.co.uk).
Grandest of them all is Encombe, a Grade II*-listed Georgian house set in 2,000 acres of rolling Dorset countryside. It was put up for sale last September at £25m and attracted a number of viewings – including one by Sir Rich-ard Branson, who reportedly landed in the grounds in his helicopter. In December, however, it was quietly withdrawn. Savills, the selling agent, insists the selling price has not been reduced, although one source claims it went under offer for less than £20m, but the deal fell through.
So, could further falls be on the hori-zon? “We’re confident that prices are not going to bounce – it will stay where it is or drift further south,” says John Young, director of the Chesterton Humberts country-house department. The figures appear to back this up – statistics from Knight Frank show average prices have fallen by 20% in the past 12 months, and although the rate of decline has slowed, a further 4.7% was wiped from the value of prime country houses in the first quarter of this year. Part of the reason for such big discounts is the overambitious price tags carried by many of the houses that went on the market last year. “A lot of agents were slow to react to what was really going on,” Young says.
Rupert Sweeting, head of the country-house department at Knight Frank, agrees. “This time last year, nobody realised how deep the financial crisis was going to be,” he says. And, he adds, the top end of the country-house market did manage to keep going a little longer than the property market as a whole, really starting to fall only towards summer. Not that you can always blame the agent: some sellers have also been slow to tone down their price expectations.
So, should buyers always be wary of houses that have been reduced? “You’ve got to do an awful lot of due diligence into what you’re buying,” says Tom Hudson, a director of Middleton Advisors, a top-end buying agency. “It’s important that you know of any issues.”
It remains to be seen, however, whether the next few weeks will see the traditional spring resurgence of interest in the country-house market. “The agents are valuing responsibly now,” Hudson says. “What is coming on is realistically priced.”
One of the first of this year’s grand estates is Linkenholt – 2,003 acres of rural Hampshire that includes an Edwardian manor house, farm and woodland and the village itself – all 21 houses of it. It is being sold by a charitable trust set up by the late Herbert Blagrave, a philanthropic cricketer, amateur jockey, racehorse owner and trainer, who died in 1981.
With no heir, Blagrave left his fortune to a trust, along with orders that the money be spent on sick children, the elderly and injured jockeys. Since then, the various properties that make up the estate, including the manor house, have been rented out to tenants, but, as much of Blagrave’s fortune is still tied up in Linkenholt, the trustees have decided the time has come to free up the capital for use elsewhere. The estate, which was launched last month, comes with a guide price of £23m-£25m (020 7664 6646, jackson-stops.co.uk).
In today’s market, however, a price cut – provided it is in double figures in percentage terms – can be what is needed to shift a stubborn property. Lubbon Ho, near Sherborne in Dorset, came down from £2m to £1.25m and is now under offer. And Chimay, a six-bedroom, neo-Georgian property in Oxshott, Surrey, that failed to sell last year at £4.5m, has now found a buyer at £3.5m.
The results of a price cut can often be surprising. “We had a house in Surrey that we put on for £7m – several people liked it but didn’t want to bid,” Sweeting says. “We reduced it to £5m, which piqued their interest. In the end it went for just over £7m, and that was a gazump.” The question is, could the same happen to Foscote Manor?
By Lucy Denyer'