Tuesday 6 February 2018

Country house with grand ideas


Oh my. This red-brick lovely was sent to me by regular reader KB, and I am absolutely smitten.
Grade II listed, 10 bedrooms (more or less), gorgeous outbuildings and, aside from the much-needed barrowload of cash and bucketload of ambition, enormous potential.
As KB wrote:
Love the website - been visiting for years in search of beautiful ‘wrecks’. Thought I’d send you this lovely 10 bedroom house in Barrow-On-Humber in case you haven’t seen it. Hopefully someone will see it and rescue it.
Indeed.
If you don't know the area, Barrow-on-Humber is a large village on the other side of the water to my former home city. I have fond memories of crossing over on the ferry from Hull Corporation Pier to New Holland and Barrow and a place that seemed incredibly green, exciting, and my first taste of proper countryside.
I miss that ferry. Not that I don't also love the bridge, but ferries add something exotic to cities. A possibility of travel, of crossing waters, of leaving. 
Bridges link this place to that place; ferries show us the horizon.

The Queen and Prince Phillip leaving Hull's Corporation Pier: More here
Anyway, back to the house. Built in the 18th century, The Grove, on Wold Road last sold in 2010, for £224k, and, despite hiking up the price by roughly £10k a year since then, the buyer doesn't appeared to have done much more than board up the odd window and leave this handsome home to rot.



It was put up for auction in 2015, through DDM and the same agent as today, with a guide price of £300k. And up for auction again in 2016, this time with Savills and a guide price of £270k. It didn't sell but went on the market at £285k.
Why am I telling you all this stuff about historic sale (or rather non-sale) figures? Because I think the current £295k price is too high. Whatever the handsomeness of the house and loveliness of the location, the longer the seller sits on it without securing it, the more damage The Grove sustains and the less attractive it becomes as a Grand Design.
This house is gorgeous and I adore it, but it needs some serious investment. It needed investment 10 years ago, and in 2015, and in 2016.






As well as those ten bedrooms, there are four reception rooms, kitchens, two bathrooms (and en-suite possibilities in some of those smaller bedrooms) in the main house and attached coach house.



Outside are a range of outbuildings, garden areas and a paddock, around 3.5 acres in all. There's an overage clause on the paddock - no details on the sale particulars but normally these clauses clawback cash if you sell off the land later or build on it and then sell the new properties. Another reason perhaps to query that £295k price.





The house overlooks fields and is in a quiet area off Wold Road, on the edge of the village and in easy reach of the A15, A180 and M180. 
On the market  through Pygott Crone, details here and here, and PDF here.