Il Priorato

There has been a house on this spot since the fifteenth century, and you can feel it. What greets you to day is a handsome Georgian front in a quiet corner of Britwell Salome, below the Chiltern escarpment — a house that has grown gently over five hundred years and is all the better for it.
The front door opens into a proper reception hall, the kind that sets the tone for a house, with three fine reception rooms leading off it. The drawing room runs to 34 feet, with windows on three sides, so it is bright from breakfast until the light goes; the dining room has an inglenook that comes into its own on winter evenings; and there is a smaller, cosier sitting room for everything in between.
The kitchen is where the house really lives. Timber beams overhead, an Aga at its heart, Shaker cabinetry around a generous island, and room for a table where most of family life will inevitably happen — with a walk-in pantry, a boot room for muddy dogs and wellies, and a quiet study close by.
Upstairs are eight bedrooms, every one a double — a rare thing, and a house party waiting to happen. The principal room looks out on two sides and has its own dressing room and bathroom; two more bedrooms are en suite, and a large family bathroom serves the rest.
The drive sweeps past the front door to a courtyard flanked by period barns and outbuildings, and it is here that the Priory - once home to The Priory Vintage Car Company for 22 years since 2000 - reveals its ambitions. One outbuilding holds an office beneath a magnificent double- height vaulted ceiling — a place to work that no commute could rival — with a self- contained two-bedroom flat above the stables, complete with its own reception room, kitchen and bathroom, ready for guests, grandparents or a housekeeper. The great barn offers garaging and storage on a scale that invites ideas: studio, party barn, collection of cars. The potential is considerable.
The gardens unfold in a series of rooms of their own. A walled garden hides a folly; a walled kitchen garden with its glasshouse keeps the table supplied through the seasons; and an orchard, immaculate lawns, clipped hedges and fine mature trees do the rest. There is a tennis court, a swimming pool with its own pavilion, and beyond it all a nine-acre field — the full country life, in other words, arranged around a house that has been practising it since the fifteenth century.