Guaranteed Rental – Putting your property to work at Christmas

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Emma Weston-Scott spreads her fabrics over the kitchen table, which is three metres long for a reason. She is busy making bespoke Christmas bunting. Her big seller has Father Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Snowman, a Christmas pudding and a tree sewn on to five flags by hand.
“I began in 2004 because my daughter Charlotte asked for bunting in her bedroom,” she says. “I wanted it made in a particular colour and design and I couldn’t find it. So it started as a hobby. Then, when the royal wedding came along in 2011, I had so much interest from people wanting Union flags that it just snowballed.”
Her designs for weddings now are double sided with a different design on each side. Even a rockabilly wedding didn’t faze her. She made jeans into flags.
“I am a traditionalist,” she says. “I lived in Scandinavia for eight years and love the simple white, red, old-fashioned designs for Christmas.”
She buys vintage fabrics, and velvet corduroy from a mill in Lancashire. She has also started doing bunting workshops at The Sewing Box, a family-run fabric shop in Morpeth, Northumberland. She has become known in the area as Emma Bunting (emma-bunting.co.uk) and uses it as her professional name.

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The Chapel, two miles out of town where she lives with Charlotte, who is now 12, Oliver, 14, and their two labradors, is both work and home. It has four bedrooms, the old Victorian vegetable beds which went with the old hall next door, a log cabin, fire pit and totem pole. They are now selling through Strutt & Parker (01670 516123) at £575,000 to move into town and be more at the centre of things.

Christmas is a time to make and bake. We bring out our sloe gin, cakes and puddings, harvest our turkeys and stock up with wine. Alastair Peebles moved with his wife Carol to Devon six years ago to start the Devon Country House and Wine School. The 17th-century farmhouse, Redyeates Farm, gave them the perfect arrangement of a four-bedroom house, three-bedroom barn with a wine room, and three-bedroom dairy with a wine cellar.

“I had done 40 years in the wine trade and 10 years as wine director for Berry Brothers & Rudd,” says Alastair. “And Carol is a very good cook.” So they set up the wine school and it became hugely successful. They won the Visit England five-star gold award and were picked out by the Telegraph as one of the UK’s 100 best affordable hotels. Their method is to host tastings, wine courses and lunches, and Alastair brings out a succession of delicious wines while dispensing knowledge in an un-pompous way.

They want to move while they are on a high, so the house at Cheriton Fitzpaine, near Exeter, is for sale at £950,000 (Savills, 01363 866742). In future they will host events at Darts Farm, Topsham, which Alastair describes as “the Devonian equivalent of Harrods Food Hall”. The launch party featured a chilled manzanilla sherry (with olives and ibérico ham), white Beaujolais (with salmon pâté and smoked salmon), Nuits-Saint-Georges (with rare Exmoor beef), and Sauternes (with Roquefort cheese).
“The saltiness of the Roquefort accelerates the sweetness of the wine,” says Alastair. “We don’t sell wine but we tell people about it. I’m interested in the £10 to £25 level. Most of us buy at £3.99 or £4.99, so this gives people an idea of something different.”
He hopes that Redyeates will be bought by someone with a similar big idea. “It would be good if it could be used as a cooking school, art school, or a wine school,” he says.
The scene-setter for every house at this time of year is the Christmas tree, smelling of the forest. Paul Goodchild has been growing them for years on his small farm, North Ford Farmhouse, at Rivenham in Essex. “I’m not like the big growers who produce 20,000 to 30,000 trees,” he says. “I have around 200 to 300 Norwegian spruce on around a quarter of an acre.”

“I sell only by word of mouth. I like people to choose their tree while it is still growing, then I cut it down the week before Christmas. Most growers cut in November, so that by the time you get to Christmas the needles are dropping off.”
He sells at about £2 a foot, and customers come back year after year. On the rest of his 10 acres he keeps a plantation of cricket bat willows, which he sells to J S Wright & Sons, the world’s largest supplier of English bats.
He and his wife Anne now feel they need a change, so the four-bedroom farmhouse with outbuildings, stable and land is on the market at £800,000 through Jackson-Stops & Staff (01245 467668). “This is my pension,” says Paul. “We are in our mid sixties and have been here since 1969.” It will soon be time to cut a tree for his own family Christmas, when his children and grandchildren gather around. If he sells North Ford Farmhouse, then this will be the last time.

Jon Willcocks took this photograph (above) of his house in midwinter and used it as a Christmas card. He is a graphic designer, illustrator and photographer who works in the converted stable block at home. He illustrates Christmas cards as well, and drew a lively illustration of the South Buckinghamshire Choral Society, with which his wife Jeanette sings, on tour in Italy to raise funds for the church in Monterosso, which had been flooded. Their charming Queen Anne home, Mead Farm, with five bedrooms and studio at Farnham Common, Surrey, is for sale through Savills (01494 731950) at £1,249,000.

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