Trading up, trading down

Trading up: London. It's large, imposing and, by capital standards, cheap. For £595,000 you get four bedrooms (three of them doubles), three receptions and a banqueting kitchen in a tranquil cul-de-sac close to Crystal Palace station in SE9. Most of the rooms are double aspect and all are beautifully groomed with fireplaces and wooden floors and swish fittings. There's also a mosaic tiled wet room. It was on for more than £800,000 but there's an impediment: the garden is a courtyard affair at the side.
Wooster Stock, 020 8613 0060 Photograph: Wooster Stock/Wooster Stock

Trading up: Dorset . You can enlarge your family heedlessly in this four-bed cottage on the edge of Donhead St Andrew near Shaftesbury. French windows open the thickly beamed dining room on to a terrace, one end of the large living room is swallowed by a stone inglenook fireplace, the hall is large enough to double as a study, and you could ask local planning officials to let you do something with the stone outbuilding. Cost: £465,000.
Jackson-Stops & Staff, 01747 850858 Photograph: Jackson-Stops & Staff/Jackson-Stops & Staff

Trading down: Yorkshire. If circumstances require you to start a new life in miniature, here is the solution. It was built as a mission school in the 1850s and is now a one-bed bungalow in the moorland village of Stape. The lane outside leads into a forest and there are wild beauties all round. Inside is a decent-sized sitting room and a lavishly beamed kitchen/breakfast room. To the front is a patch of garden. Yours for £188,000.
Beanland Illingworth, 01751 475557 Photograph: Beanland Illingworth/Beanland Illingworth

Trading down: London. It resembles a lane in a Cornish fishing village, yet this floral row lies in south-east London close to Peckham Rye station. Round the corner is the colourful chaos of Rye Lane with its congestion of ethnic groceries. Iron gates shelter the alley from cars and the cottages face each other across long front gardens. Inside this one, for £315,000, it is roomy, airy and chic with wooden floors, a rustic staircase, french doors from the bay on to the garden and two bedrooms.
Wooster Stock, 020 7708 6700 Photograph: Wooster Stock/Wooster Stock

Dream home: Devon. It looks as though it grew out of Dartmoor, so thoroughly have three centuries weathered its granite walls. Inside its antiquity is preserved in the beamed ceilings, a huge fireplace and a bread oven. An extension supplies a third reception with a high timbered ceiling and a mezzanine, which could be a study or extra bedroom. Two bedrooms are upstairs and two more in the stone outbuilding, which could be incorporated into the main farmhouse with planning consent. A third of an acre of garden overlooks moorland; beyond is the hamlet of Hexworthy. Cost: £440,000.
Stags, 01803 865454 Photograph: Stags/Stags