‘There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort,’ wrote the eminently quotable Jane Austen in Emma, in 1815. ‘Nobody can be more devoted to home than I am.’
If the incomparable Regency writer and social critic could see Steventon House, on the site of her birthplace and childhood home in Hampshire, she would doubtless approve. Although it’s not quite on the scale of the manicured estates that feature so largely in her property-obsessed novels, the Grade II listed 1820s home is all Georgian elegance, with 7,000 sq ft of living space, beautifully proportioned high-ceilinged receptions and fine period features including decorative fireplaces, cornicing, and working shutters.
The six-bed property, in the village of Steventon, a 15-minute drive from Basingstoke, has been given a plush country-house makeover by the family that has owned it for the past eight years or so, now on the market for £8.5 million with Savills and Knight Frank.
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