The Notswolds are the new Cotswolds — just ask Earl Spencer - The Times

After a 50-mile drive up the M40 out of London, your lifestyle sat-nav will prompt an important decision. Turn left for the Cotswolds — Daylesford, Range Rover EVs, old rock stars, the Beckhams, Ellen DeGeneres, padel, Estelle Manor, the King and Jeremy Clarkson. Or turn right and choose the “Notswolds”, the “spires and squires” shire of Aynho, Farthinghoe, Silverstone. Aristocrats, rugby, Castle Ashby and Charles Spencer’s Althorp estate, where his nephew Harry and Meghan headed for in the summer.

Official boundaries do not exist, but informally, socially (and commercially) the Notswolds is the area between South Northamptonshire and Rutland, stretching to the borderlands of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire. Among estate agents and social circles, the divide is quietly acknowledged — one side of the M40 is world famous, the other wilfully anonymous. “Even English people don’t know where Northamptonshire is,” as the Chanel model and long-time Notswolds homeowner Edie Campbell likes to say.

Its most famous resident is, of course, Charles Spencer, whose family seat at Althorp is one of about 50 stately homes in Notswoldian Northamptonshire — in fact, the county has more grand piles per square mile than any other in England. But while the houses may be huge, the money here is on mute. This,its residents (among them F1 managers, celebrities, art dealers and aristocrats) will whisper, is the low-key version of the Cotswolds.

Visuals are subtly different. Notswolds architecture is Palladian, Georgian, while interior design is a blend of practical, traditional and inherited, “not shiny and shop bought”, says the Notswolds go-to interior designer Alice Crossman. “No one here wants to be flash.

“Just like in the Cotswolds, our big houses do have electric gates at the end of the drive, but we like to disguise them so they look like really old, traditional gates.”

You can see the Notswolds/Cotswolds lifestyles and priorities marked out in the car parks and on the touchlines of interschool Notswolds v Cotswolds sport fixtures. On one side of the pitch the mums are all immaculate wearing the latest trends and perfect blow-dries. On the other? “We don’t do blow-dries around here,” says Sophie Bonsor, a Notswolds property finder who moved to the area from London four years ago. “We do have Range Rovers,” she assures me. “But also a lot of Skodas, Jaecoos, Kias and battered Land Rovers. No shame in that.”

While the Cotswolds has influencers’ honeypots Estelle Manor and Soho Farmhouse, the Notswolds has the Northampton Saints rugby club, attracting loyal support from the likes of Claudia Schiffer who, with her film director husband Matthew Vaughn, owns a spectacular modernist house (with editing suite, screening room, wine cellar, massage room, Pilates and barre studio, slate-walled swimming pool) on the Notswolds’ Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border.

Although, inevitably, a gentle Californication of this low-key area is already in motion. Over in the Rutland wetlands, at the far reaches of the blurred Notswolds borders, there’s Woolfox, a new private members’ club — spa, yoga studio and golf course — with a Nobu hotel, restaurant and “branded residences” spanning a 185-acre waterside site on the way. Developers claim the project reflects continued demand for “experience-led” destinations such as the Newt in Somerset, the Pig hotels and, yep, Soho Farmhouse.

Then there’s the reimagining of the old (and demolished) hotel and golf club at pretty Farthingstone: the new Fifty Five Farthingstone country club, helmed by the hotelier Hayden Nadler and still under construction, will feature 61 Soho Farmhouse-like cabins, spa, gym and pool.

For people with children, like Prince Harry and Meghan — widely reported to be living in the Cotswolds near Charles at Althorp — the proliferation of highly rated prep and senior schools in the area is partly key to the Notswolds’ attraction. Crucially, many of them are day schools, rather than just for boarders, acknowledging a trend for wealthy types wanting to be hands-on parents. (The Vaughn/Schiffers chose local day schools for their three kids.)

Sophie Bonsor, whose former focus was on Chelsea and Notting Hill, sources properties in the area for the wealthy (often before they come on the market) and moved to the Northants area herself for the schools.

She had originally planned to commute from the capital but quickly realised that there was a career opportunity in Northamptonshire as well — most rural upscale property finders based themselves exclusively in the Cotswolds, ignoring the its neighbouring county. “The number of excellent schools in the vicinity — Rugby, Oundle, Beachborough, Bilton Grange, Winchester House, Tudor Hall, Bloxham, Radley College — many with a day pupil option, is a real pull,” Bonsor says.

“I haven’t looked back since. People are drawn to this area, yes, by the good schools, but also beautiful stone houses, pretty villages, rural life, significantly cheaper property prices and easy connections to London and the north.”

Sophie Bonsor’s Notswolds’ networking group of local artistic movers and shakers includes the Northants-born interior designer Rebecca de Courcy-Ireland and the Fulham escapee Sinclair Sellars, who co-founded the coffee shop Chapel & Co in Blakesley. Here you’ll find work by local artists like Leah Wood (daughter of Ronnie).

Should you be a more horsey type, the Bicester or Grafton hunts are rootsy, rainy, thorny family affairs, Alice Crossman says. Want to charter a PJ? Sywell Aerodrome in Northamptonshire (for prop planes and light jets) and London Oxford airport (longer runway, so private jet-friendly) are within easy reach. Destinations for Instagrammers are the photogenic villages of Culworth, Sulgrave and Eydon.

Sophie Bonsor recommends the Plough in Everdon and the Royal Oak in Eydon as the best Sunday lunch spots.

Will there be star-spotting like the Cotswolds? The Notswolds has plenty of celebrity residents, mostly landed and low-key: the White Cube owner Jay Jopling and his art-curator wife, Hikari Yokoyama; Schiffer and Vaughn; Leah and Jo Wood; Jo Whiley. Craig Revel Horwood or Geri Halliwell-Horner may be on hand to open the village fête.

And a few millionaires too. At Rowler Manor in Croughton, Northamptonshire, the financier and friend of the Sussexes Ian Wace has built a £20 million home that incorporates a private lake, farm, trout farm, stables, water-bottling plant, abattoir and bowling alley cleverly disguised to look like a medieval tower.

Over at her husband’s family farmhouse north of Brackley, Alice Crossman, who worked for Wace, is now transforming the property into a private events venue aimed at the lucrative Silverstone F1 audience (ten bedrooms, pony stables, swimming pool, tennis court, helipad). The facilities may be modern but the aesthetic is understated. “Re-dig the foundations, put in a modern heating system … Then put back the old curtains that used to belong to your granny.”

What really appeals to her in this region is the proliferation of local craftspeople, she says. “And some of the craftsmen we employed from London became so attached to the Notswolds area — nicer lifestyle, plenty of work — that they actually decided to move here after the job was finished.”

Should Harry and Meghan choose to make their UK move permanent and think about buying a Notswolds home, a grand estate property with granny’s old curtains and state-of-the-art heating might prove elusive.

As Charles Spencer will explain, landed families in this area tend to keep hold of their big houses. Northamptonshire is celebrated as Britain’s stately home capital — these include grade I listed Althorp, Cottesbrooke Hall, the reputed inspiration for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and owned by the Macdonald-Buchanan family, and the Duke of Buccleuch’s Boughton House, aka “the English Versailles”.

“On the upside, the area is rife with old rectories,” Sophie Bonsor says. On her radar is a seven-bedroom, grade II listed former rectory built in 1842 to serve the medieval church of St Mary the Virgin, Farthingstone, with outbuildings, a detached coach house and just 70 miles from London, that seems like a snip at £1,350,000. A similar Cotswolds house would be priced at least 20 per cent more.

Or there’s the part-18th-century Manor Farm at Stoke Bruerne: five bedrooms, outbuildings, garages, stables, a barn and 2.25 acres of gardens and paddocks — at £1.5 million. How come it’s so cheap?

A lack of perceived glamour and Daylesford adjacency means that “you get much more bang for your buck here”, Bonsor says. “We are in F1 country here — the Mercedes-AMG Petronas, Aston Martin Aramco and Red Bull teams all based in the area — so people do want space for their classic car collections.” This being the low-key Notswolds, these will be “discreet underground car parks”.

There are splashes of Montecito style here too. The recently completed ultramodern Capability House on the Aynhoe Park Estate, Aynho, offers four bedrooms for £4.25 million. Named to honour the original celebrity gardener Capability Brown, who landscaped Aynhoe Park’s rolling rear view, the house is a modern blend of local stone and blackened wood cladding. And handy for both the M40 and a wood-fired pizza at Restoration Hardware’s chichi restaurant.

Capability House was built by the property developer Jantiene Sobry, who bought the land from Aynhoe’s previous owner before it was sold to Restoration Hardware’s Gary Friedman for conversion to an upscale furniture showroom and fine dining destination. Sobry’s company, Sobry Beak, is best known for its sought-after Cotswold stone new-builds on the other side of the M40 in Ascott-under-Wychwood and Chadlington. Capability House was her first foray into the Notswolds and now she’s a convert. “I feel less of an impostor here,” says Belgian-born Sobry, who has lived on the Aynhoe Park estate for five years. “It feels more authentic somehow.”

Of course the colourway of the Notswolds’ indigenous geology is of vital importance. In the Cotswolds, the aspirant stone is a honey tone. In the Notswolds, a coarser, more textured, ferruginous sandstone and calcareous ironstone dominates. The colour is greenish-grey, oxidising into deep foxy brown, ochre when wet and weathered.

In towns such as Towcester, Bugbrooke and Harlestone, the banded ironstone was used to build boundary walls, cottages, historic churches and grand manor houses, like Ashby Manor House at Ashby St Ledgers, nestled between the market town of Daventry and the Watford Gap service station on the M1. With its south-facing, Lutyens-designed grand hall and fabled “plot room”, where Guy Fawkes made plans to assassinate King James I and blow up the House of Lords in 1605, it has more stories to tell than, say, the VIP pools at Estelle Manor.

It is owned by Nova and Henry Guest, who purchased it from Henry’s cousin, the 4th Viscount Wimborne, with walls bedecked with Aboriginal art (Nova was born in Perth, Australia), painted in — get this! — Farrow & Ball’s “Wimborne White” and built from locally quarried Hornton brown stone. “Which is,” Nova insists, “far superior to any of your yellow Cotswolds stone.”

The Guests have adapted the house, which was mentioned in the Domesday Book and in 1921 hosted the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII), for private hire, weddings and events. Nova has plans to turn the pump house into a coffee shop selling flowers and homemade produce.

“The house is not open to the public,” she says. “But pretty much everyone in the area has visited.”

Once you’ve finished driving through the fancy Cotswolds, she says, “you get here to where the real people live”.

Key social figures are James and Mary Miller (the former deputy chairman of Sotheby’s and director of Marlborough Fine Art respectively), the British-American artist Nancy Cadogan and her husband Edward Guinness, Charles Spencer, and Viscount Luke Bridgeman and his wife Victoria. Notswolds social life tends to be art and culture driven, Nova says. “Mainly at each other’s houses — we never go anywhere where you have to actually pay for a cocktail. That’s more of a Cotswolds thing.”