Trading up, trading down – in pictures

Trading up: Oxfordshire. The planning permission to create a kitchen, living room and dining room in the adjoining stone barn may seem superfluous when you already have all three in good size in the existing house. But this expansion will allow you to sort out the current problem with the bedrooms: you have to walk through the third to reach the fourth. But if you can’t face builders, the inconvenience is a small price to pay for the glorious location in the Cotswold village of Leafield, near Burford. A large inglenook fireplace and beams throughout are testament to the house’s 500-year-old history, but modernity has added a garage at the end of the large gardens. On the market for £525,000.
Jackson-Stops & Staff, 01993 822661
Photograph: Jackson-Stops & Staff

Trading up: Devon. It’s a bit steep for a three-bed semi – £549,500 – but that’s because it’s in a steep setting with a panorama over the Dartmouth estuary and the village of Dittisham. The three bedrooms are more or less doubles (albeit two of them are dainty), the kitchen accommodates populous feasting, a boot room stretches the length of the house and you can tan in a sun room and conservatory. If you can cope with the hill starts you can stow a car in the double garage, and you'll have a lifetime of holidays on your doorstep in the South Hams area of outstanding natural beauty.
Marchand Petit, 01803 839190
Photograph: Marchand Petit

Trading down: Devon. This is an affordable way to harness the glories of the sailing resort of Salcombe, where you need to be half way to your first million to buy a house. In the nearby village of Marlborough, £159,950 buys you two bedrooms and an open-plan living area, all newly refurbished. The disappointment is the lack of garden and the double yellow lines direcly outside the cottage, but south Devon offers compensatory miles of beach and countryside in which to perch on a deckchair.
Marchand Petit, 01548 844473
Photograph: Marchand Petit

Trading down: London. This is some shrinkage – it’s one of six newly refurbished studio apartments – but a glossy, prestigious one. The Holly Lodge estate on the lower slopes of Highgate, one of north London’s most bijou villages, was built to house single women moving to the capital to seek employment in the 1920s. Just a short walk to Highgate Ponds and the greenery of Parliament Hill, the mock Tudor buildings are grouped round ornamental gardens. The £280,000 asking price wouldn’t buy you anything much bigger in this moneyed part of town, and you get private parking.
Goldschmidt & Howland, 020 8347 2600
Photograph: Goldschmidt & Howland

Bargain of the week: London. Such roomy graciousness in trendy Peckham Rye would usually require close to £300,000. But this large, oak-floored living room and two good-sized bedrooms are yours for £214, 950 because it’s over a nail bar. But beware: mortgage lenders usually demand higher deposits if you buy over a shop, and insurers are nervous of the flammable liquids in nail bars. The immediate location may be unglamorous, but there’s a 168-year lease, no ground rent and the East London line will soon be arriving.
Roy Brooks, 020 8299 3021
Photograph: Roy Brooks