By Francesca Peacock
Set back from the bustle of Hampstead Village is a property that’s something of a logical impossibility. A country house within a stone’s throw of central London, more than three centuries old and yet still fit for a modern family.
This fairytale house is Cloth Hill: a Queen Anne-style property, built in the 1690s by a Quaker cloth merchant, and currently on the market with Savills. The second oldest house in Hampstead (losing out on the title only to the National Trust’s 1693 property Fenton House), Cloth Hill is a Grade II* listed, six-bedroom marvel. Since its origins in the 17th century — when it supposedly received its name from the laundresses who used the area’s fresh water to do their washing — the house has played witness to history. It was visited by Voltaire in the early 18th century, bought by the portrait painter George Romney in 1796, and painted by Ford Madox Brown in the 19th century.
In the past 140 years, the house has only had three owners. Most recently, it’s been home to retired American lawyer Tom and his wife Barbara who bought it in the early 1990s after renting in the area for more than a decade. The Queen Anne proportions and Georgian features attracted them to it — in the 10 years they’d lived in an Edwardian house, they spent “almost every weekend looking at National Trust houses”. Suddenly, they had a sizeable historical property of their own, one which seems like a time machine to another age. Looking out of their sash windows, they can see only foliage and the other Georgian houses on Heath Street. “Everything . . . that surrounds us is Georgian as well”, says Barbara.
It would be a mistake to assume that Cloth Hill is a museum to the past. After buying the house, Tom and Barbara began a complete refurbishment to make it more liveable for them and their four children. After the essentials — rewiring, improved central heating and plumbing — they worked with English Heritage to ensure that the interiors were sympathetic to the age of the house. The results are seen in the true Georgian paint colours on the wood panelling (after the fire at the National Trust’s Uppark house, restoration experts sought out Cloth Hill to find a match for a particular Georgian shade). The sash windows were unbricked and restored and many original features were kept intact, from the fireplaces to the hand-carved staircases.
The current owners did make one dramatic change. At the back of the house is an extension, with a family kitchen leading out to the garden. It was a big move for a house that had, by then, survived for more than three centuries unchanged. As Tom says, “if [English Heritage] hoped to have it survive another 300 years, they had to incentivise people to put money and effort into . . . keeping it up. And to do that, you had to make it liveable”.
Another major draw of the property are the walled gardens that wrap around the house on three sides. Part of the garden initially had a separate address; at some point the land was intended for another house. Cloth Hill benefits from the lack of building with its extensive lawns, mature trees and planting, which is in keeping with the house’s 17th-century origins. It's in those gardens that a photo was taken in 1893, showing the family then living in the house, and all their servants. It’s one of the many historical treasures Barbara and Tom found in the house; a papertrail of its long history.
Photography: Savills; Alamy
