Househunter Chipping Campden, Gloucs

Kingcombe House is for connoisseurs of furniture and gardens, being the joint brainchild of the designer Sir Gordon Russell and the landscape gardener Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe. Built of Cotswold stone in 1924, the house overlooks the market town of Chipping Campden. It has five reception rooms, six bedrooms and bathrooms and four dressing rooms. The garden also features a series of "rooms" including the Cherry Orchard, the Pink Garden, the Victorian Garden and a series of troughs cascading into a moat. Savills in Banbury (01295 263535) is asking pounds 750,000.

For What It's Worth

The number of estate agents reporting falling house prices has halved in the last six months. In July 1995 one third of agents in the monthly survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said prices were going down. Now the figure has shrunk to one in six. A similar number of agents saw increases in business in the normally dark days of November and December, while 35 per cent said business had dropped off. There are sporadic outbursts of optimism but the majority of agents report that business is quiet and that buyers will look at nothing even marginally over-priced.