Ashby St Ledgers, Rugby, Northamptonshire

New to the market since the spring is Ashby St Ledgers, an historic, predominantly 17th-century house with remodelling and additions carried out by Lutyens between 1903 and 1939. Now Grade II*-listed, the 20,000-sq ft house stands in 33 acres and includes nine reception rooms and 11 bedrooms, a formal garden, walled kitchen garden, parkland, woodland, lakes and a lodge cottage. The house was home to the Catesby family who were notorious for their involvement with the Gunpowder Plot, supposedly planned in a room above the gatehouse. Lutyens was retained by Ivor Guest, later 1st Viscount Wimborne, to remodel and extend the property, and Lutyens began by rendering the original house symmetrical by adding a matching wing to the eastern elevation. Further accommodation was provided (against Lutyens’s wishes) by the addition of a 17th-century timbered house transported here lock, stock and barrel from Ipswich, which was linked to the existing building by a new North Hall. A north wing incorporating further bedrooms and domestic offices was added and the dining room extended in 1924 and again in 1938, finally providing a 110-ft vista through to the North Hall. This is the most interesting, recognisably Lutyens element as externally this wing is in a pared-back, neo-Tudor style in warm honey-coloured Banbury stone.

ASG Butler in his Lutyens Memorial volumes commends the “immense care which Lutyens — even when engaged on works of Imperial magnitude — gave to the continuous extension of a house necessarily in a style for which he latterly cared little”. The property remained in the Wimborne family until the late 1970s when it was sold. However, 20 years later, the 26-year-old 4th Viscount Wimborne bought it back and instigated an extensive, careful restoration in an understated style. The house was featured in Country Life in 2004, and clearly impressed writer and architectural historian Jeremy Musson, who enthused, “This restoration is an undoubted triumph. It shows how well an historic house can be adapted by an owner, respecting, even rescuing the integrity of the original while… adding a layer of new sophistication… That the house has also received another layer of elegance with such lightness of touch is an inspiration”. Now beautifully presented, the house has a guide price of £5m through Savills.