Fancy old house

Oh my goodness I think it's the Adams family house! This is the only Victorian house that I have liked.

Can you believe that this Victorian fixer upper for sale was the gathering place for the social set all through the 1950s? Yes, the six bedroom, two bath

Gingerbread trim can make cottages with simple lines look like houses straight out of storybooks.

Some photos from last week at Asthall Manor. A dreamy Jacobean Cotswolds manor house that was the childhood home of the Mitford sisters. Everything about Asthall Manor is romantic – the gables, the roses, the lake, the ballroom, and the swans on the willow-bordered River Windrush. The house, which dates from 1620, was immortalised as Alconleigh in Nancy Mitford’s ‘The Pursuit of Love’. Fans of the 1945 novel will be thrilled to learn that the ‘Hons’ cupboard’ remains intact at the top of the…

My glamorous father - foreign correspondent, explorer of Tibet - was the son of a penniless immigrant. My Delphic mother belonged to a (no other way to put it) degenerate branch of an old Southern family, distinguished in another era for political and financial contributions to the Confederacy. Because or perhaps in spite of this, I was, while growing up, imbued with a sharp sense of the word "background." My own is a sort of cocktail - 3 parts romance, l part adventure, 2 parts amazing luck…