The House

Built in 1874.
Ours since 2019.

A shooting lodge for a family who liked the valley enough never to quite leave it. We are the fourth people to own it and the first to let anybody else stay.

Seventeen, and no more

Why it stays small

Seventeen rooms is what the house has. We could get to twenty-four by taking the library, the morning room and the top of the back stair, and we have had that drawing done twice by two different architects, and both times we have put it in a drawer.

Seventeen rooms means one dinner sitting, one table, and a staff who know everybody's name by the second evening. Twenty-four means two sittings and a rota. That is the whole argument.

One dinner sitting
One long table
Never more than seventeen

1874 Built

A Vaughan family shooting lodge

17 Rooms

Never one more than seventeen

400 Acres

Private valley, river and oak wood

3 Rosettes

AA Rosettes at The Cellar

A chronology

One hundred and fifty years, abbreviated

1874 Built for the Vaughan family as a shooting lodge, on the strength of a valley they had visited once and could not stop thinking about.

1907 The coach house and the walled garden added, along with a water turbine that powered the house until 1958 and is still down there.

1961 The dairy stops being a dairy. It spends the next fifty years as somewhere to keep a tractor.

1974 The library catalogued, once, badly. The card index survives and is wrong about roughly a third of the books.

2019 We take the house on. The fireplaces, the crooked staircase and the walled garden stay. Nearly everything else goes.

2022 The Cellar takes its third rosette. The dairy reopens as the bathhouse.

The Vaughans

They came for a fortnight in 1873 and bought the valley the following spring.

Kept

What stayed

Eleven fireplaces, the crooked staircase, the walled kitchen garden, the turbine house, eleven hundred books and the name.

Let go

What went

A carpeted bar, a conservatory added in 1988, forty-one radiators, the tarmac in front of the house, and any suggestion of a spa menu.

The morning room, wing chairs drawn up to the fire

The people

Twenty-two of us, and most live within nine miles

There are twenty-two people on the payroll and eighteen of them grew up within nine miles of the gate. Tom has kept the river since 2007. Rhian has cooked here since 2020. The gardener predates all of us and takes a dim view of change.

Come and see it