The Melbury Bubb House is available for purchase in a quaint Dorset village, and Penny Churchill gives us a glimpse.
Could there be a name more delightful than ‘Melbury Bubb’ for an English village? Its mere mention seems to spread joy and warmth; truly, such a name could only belong to England.
Famed as the muse for the fictional Great Hintock in Thomas Hardy’s novel “The Woodlanders,” this village is endearingly small, home to just 40 people according to the last count. Should you wish to become resident number 41, you’re in luck. Savills has listed the Melbury Bubb House, also known as The Old Rectory, with a starting price of £2.65 million.
The Melbury Bubb House boasts a spacious kitchen/breakfast area with an electric Aga, several living spaces, a children’s play area, and seven bedrooms, with most providing scenic views of the garden and the surrounding rural landscape.
The house’s outdoor dining area offers sweeping 180-degree vistas of gently wooded hillsides.
The property, which covers just over four acres, includes expansive lawns bordered by abundant flowerbeds. There’s also a fenced and hedged paddock to the east suited for horses or livestock.
To the south lies a complex with seven stables and the Moon Daisy building, which has two offices and a meeting room. Additionally, there is a separate building that houses an indoor swimming pool.
Ashley Rawlings, the selling agent, believes that Melbury Bubb House is perfect for a family, especially appreciating that the only access to the village is via a dead-end road.
The house itself dates back to the late Georgian period and has Victorian-era enhancements, with a literary claim to fame from Hardy’s novel. This is where the character Edred Fitzpiers stayed, while his love interest, Grace Melbury, lived across in what’s now called The Manor House.
This locale seems like a step back in time, complete with a small railway halt at Chetnole, just across the fields, where passengers must flag down the train driver for service to Bristol, Weymouth, and Paddington.
