This 15th century cottage is set within the National Trust estate of Killerton, so it’s a protected idyll a mile from the mansion and seven miles from Exeter. There’s a bread oven beside the sitting-room fireplace and window seats under the casements. The snug ribbings of beams will distract you from the smallness of the rooms (you can always overspill into the summer house) and the fact that one of the three bedrooms opens off another. For £120 a year you can use the paddock adjoining the large gardens. Because it’s on National Trust land it’s on a lease, which expires in 2096, and you have to pay ground rent and an annual contribution to buildings insurance. Yours for £350,000.
Wilkinson Grant, 01392 427500 Photograph: Wilkinson Grant
The aesthetic glories of this £355,000 cottage have earned it a place on calendars, in jigsaws and in several horticultural magazines. Its quaintness continues as abundantly inside with inglenook fireplaces in the sitting room and kitchen, exposed studwork and brick floors. It's a spacious quaintness, too, with two receptions, an inner hall and a utility room off the large kitchen. The warren of rooms accessed via two staircases and the study could be adapted as a fourth bedroom if you tired of commuting through the first upstairs bedroom to reach the second.
David Burr, 01787 883144 Photograph: David Burr
The modern part of this two-bedroom bungalow was added in the 18th century. The rest is of 400-year-old vintage, as testified by the thick stone walls and the inglenook with bread oven. Although it’s daintily sized, both bedrooms are swollen by box bays and large gardens buffer the property front and back. It’s tucked prettily in a valley outside the village of Freshwater, a short drive to the ferries at Yarmouth. On sale for £265,000.
Wright, 01983 327112 Photograph: Wright
Most of the village is as pretty as this £360,000 house and abides by a conservation order, so you will inhabit a sanitised time-warp where modern additions – in this case a new kitchen, two bathrooms and an extended living room opening on to the large walled garden – meld unobtrusively. Some antique features are less convenient – there is restricted head height in the three eaves bedrooms. The car can live off-street – you’ll need it for the nearest shopping facilities, which are a mile away.
Strutt & Parker, 01295 672092 Photograph: Strutt & Parker
£250,000 goes a long way in South Africa. There’s nothing small about this smallholding with its four receptions, five bedrooms, four bathrooms and four garages. There are dramatic vaulted ceilings and exposed stone walls and a separate self-contained cottage for relatives. Running costs for the luxuries are minimised by the solar heating that warms the swimming pool, three geysers and a borehole. Summer heat needn't frighten you, either – the thatch is adapted to be flameproof and the rooms are air-conditioned.
Fine & Country, +27 21 975 1302 Photograph: Fine & Country
