Old shop has views open all hours

THE Old Shop, situated on a road running through Harpsden, is a four-bedroom cottage with views over open countryside.

Owner, Florence, moved in with her family 10 years ago.

“I fell in love with the house,” she says. “I hadn’t seen the whole house. I walked in the hallway, I was just like, this is beautiful, you can see through the house down the garden and up the fields. Then I went upstairs, I saw that had the same view and I thought that’s it, this is my house.

“What’s funny is, because it was more expensive than we were ready to pay, I was crying in the car park in the village hall, saying to my husband, ‘Someone else is going to live in my house’.

“So he went and made the best offer we could make to the estate agent and that’s how we ended up living in the house.”

The house has a tiled entrance hall, a 15ft x 15ft sitting room with open fireplace, a further living room with log burner and triple-aspect lobby area, with French doors leading on to the garden.

There is also a 23ft double-aspect kitchen/dining room with a mezzanine space above, which could be used for storage or as a study area, and double sliding patio doors leading out to the garden’s side and rear terrace areas.

Upstairs there are four double bedrooms and a large family bathroom.

There is gas-fired central heating and double glazing, mains electricity and water and private drainage. In addition to a garage, there is a separate home office or garden room and a storage shed.

The front of the garden has a small brick-paved seating area with picket fencing and climbing shrubs. The rear garden, which backs on to open countryside, has a large paved terrace with outside tap and lighting and is laid mainly to lawn.

The property has a total floor area of approximately 2,125 sq ft including the garage.

Florence adds: “I think it’s the kind of house that you fall in love with. It just has this charm, it has a beautiful feel to it. It’s very light. There’s lots of little nooks and crannies, it’s not a boring layout at all. It’s treated us very well for
10 years but now my children are grown up, they’re both at university, so we are selling very reluctantly.

“It has a history of having been fallen in love with, because the previous people had the same thing, they had to sell it when their children had mostly gone and they were heartbroken to leave.

“It used to be an actual shop, I think it was probably round the Sixties or the Seventies. Some people have been here in the village since they were born and they remember it being a shop.

“Occasionally we’ve had people knocking on the door saying ‘Do you sell tea?’”

l The Old Shop has a guide price of £895,000 and the property will be available from Boxing Day. For more information and to arrange a viewing, call Beville Estate Agency on 0118 924 2526.