In an English country garden
Summer may be over but some of the gardens we encountered this summer are so exceptional they deserve to be talked about whatever the weather is doing.
There is a particular kind of summer afternoon that only a great garden can produce. The kind where you lose track of time entirely, where the boundary between inside and outside dissolves, and where the house behind you almost becomes irrelevant. This summer, across the properties we have had the privilege of bringing to market, we have encountered gardens that do exactly that. Different in scale, character and setting, they share the quality that the best outdoor spaces always have: they feel inevitable, as though they could not belong anywhere else.
Here are four that stayed with us.
Willowbank, Mill Street, Titchfield
Some gardens take decades to establish, and you can feel it the moment you step into them. The walled garden at Willowbank, a Grade II listed Georgian home in the heart of historic Titchfield, is one of those. Just under an acre in total, it is a place of genuine botanical richness: magnificent Magnolia and Yew trees that have been growing here for generations, perennial borders of real depth, and a prolific orchard of apple, pear and quince that produces abundantly each autumn.
At one end stands a forty-foot Hartley Botanic glasshouse, the kind of structure that serious gardeners quietly dream about. At the other, the garden meets the River Meon, giving Willowbank a water boundary that very few village properties anywhere in England can claim.
It is the kind of garden that takes half an hour to walk around properly. The kind you do not leave in a hurry.
Brimptsmead Estate, Dartmeet, Dartmoor
Not every great outdoor space is a garden in the conventional sense, and Brimptsmead Estate on Dartmoor does not pretend to be. What it offers instead is something rarer and, for the right buyer, considerably more compelling: nine acres of private freehold land within Dartmoor National Park, with no public rights of way, direct access onto the open moor, and private fishing rights along the East Dart River.
The grounds include established lawns around the Arts and Crafts main house, ancient woodland that descends to the river, a meadow and a gently sloping grass field that opens onto neighbouring Duchy farmland. Footpaths lead down through the trees to the riverbank, where the water moves through a landscape that feels entirely unchanged.
There is a party barn above the stone garaging, with French doors opening onto an eleven-metre balcony and far-reaching views across the moor. But the real draw here is simpler and older than any building: the feeling of standing at the meeting of the East and West Dart Rivers, on land that belongs entirely to you, with the moor stretching away in every direction.
Waterleys House, Leicestershire
If Brimptsmead is about wildness, Waterleys House is about intention. Set within approximately fifty acres of privately managed ecological landscape in south Leicestershire, this extraordinary contemporary home, designed and built under Paragraph 55, the planning standard reserved for homes of exceptional architectural and environmental quality, sits at the centre of a landscape that has been shaped with as much care as the house itself.
Forty-two acres of wildflower meadows stretch out around the property, planted with over four thousand five hundred native trees to create shelter belts and parkland. A series of spring-fed lakes bring an abundance of wildlife and wildfowl, shifting in colour and texture through the seasons. The view from the house, through full-height glazing on the south-facing elevation, takes in water and meadow simultaneously, and the boundary between architecture and landscape is, by design, almost imperceptible.
This is not a garden that has been tended into submission. It is a living ecosystem, managed for biodiversity and beauty in equal measure, and the result is a private world that feels genuinely unlike anything else on the market.
The Dower House, Annery, Monkleigh, North Devon
The fourth garden on this list is perhaps the most personal of the four. The grounds at The Dower House, a late Georgian country house set quietly within the former Annery Estate near Bideford, have been shaped over approximately forty years by its current owner. That is not a detail to gloss over. Forty years of patient, considered attention to a piece of land produces something that no amount of budget or design intent can replicate in a shorter timeframe, and it shows at every turn here.
The 4.6 acres include terraces, lawns and planted borders close to the house, enclosed by mature trees that provide privacy and shelter. A south-facing paved terrace runs along the principal elevation, overlooking a distinctive half-moon shaped pond, with steps descending into the gardens beyond. The kitchen garden is a particular highlight: shaped beds radiating from a central point, set within a cottage-style garden, with a traditional greenhouse, fruit trees and productive planting integrated throughout in a way that speaks of genuine use rather than display.
There is a quiet, informal organic sensibility to how the grounds have been managed, working with the land over time rather than imposing on it. Approached along a long, tree-lined drive with glimpses across the Torridge Valley, the whole property carries that same unhurried quality. It is a garden that has been genuinely lived in and genuinely understood, and those two things, rarer than they sound, are precisely what makes it so difficult to leave.
A final thought
At By Design, we believe that great outdoor space is one of the most undervalued things in the premium property market. A garden that has taken generations to establish, a landscape shaped with genuine ecological vision, a position that opens onto something wild and irreplaceable: these are not features that can be replicated at any price. They are, in the truest sense, what you are really buying.
If any of these properties have caught your eye, or if you are looking for something with outdoor space at its heart, we would be very glad to help you find it.
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