Trading up, trading down - in pictures

Trading up: Rutland. This newly built house in Stretton, near Oakham, tries to combine modern necessities with period graces. The vaulted kitchen, opening on to the garden, is the largest room in the house so it can become, fashionably, the family hub. Two of the four bedrooms have en suites, while fireplaces in two of the receptions, wooden floors and panelled doors imply venerable timelessness. The £450,000 asking price buys two sitting rooms, a formal dining room to supplement the kitchen, a study and gardens. The close proximity of the A1, while convenient for travellers, could impede the rustic peace.
Smiths Gore Photograph: Smiths Gore

Trading up: Scottish Borders. If you feel loneliness in this lofty farmhouse near Selkirk you can use existing planning permission to create neighbours out of the steadings. Buffered by 5.6 acres of its own land, it overlooks the Ettrick valley and surrounding hills, and at £545,000 is large enough to accommodate the extended family in six bedrooms and four large receptions – three of them in a self-contained annexe. A degree of intimacy is inevitable, for you have to walk through one bedroom to reach the other, and there’s only one bathroom in the main part of the house.
Sale & Partners Photograph: Sale & Partners

Trading down: Edinburgh. Shrinkage into this elegantly styled, three-bedroom flat is perfectly painless, for the proportions (and the £360,000 asking price) would dwarf that of some houses – plus it has its own full-length courtyard with four cellar rooms and two stores off it. When the sun has departed this narrow basement space you can transfer to the private gardens opposite, for which a small annual sum entitles you to a key. Princes Street and the West End are a few minutes walk away.
Strutt & Parker Photograph: Strutt & Parker

Trading down: Devonshire. This is a chocolate box cliche with the thatched roof, window seats, Aga and rolling rural views – and at £195,000 it is relatively affordable for Torbryan in this coveted corner of England near Totnes. True, there is woodchip wallpaper in the sitting room and no central heating, plus you are conjoined with a neighbour, but you get a garage and outbuildings at one end of the large garden and the decor, while dated, is neutral and tidy. It is going to auction on 11 December.
Woods Photograph: Rightmove

Dream Home: North Yorkshire. Glories, natural and human-made, are all around this three-bedroom house in a third of an acre on the edge of two conservation villages with views over the North York Moors national park. Largely rebuilt in the 1920s, its name, The Mass House, derives from the Catholic masses thought to have been carried out here illicitly in the late 17th century. Yours for £400,000, the rooms are generously proportioned but need refurbishment and there are outbuildings with potential if you can win the planners over.
Smiths Gore Photograph: Smiths Gore