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The Property: A Grade A listed folly built around 1840

The Place: Keltneybridge, Kenmore, Perthshire PH15

The Price: OIEO £150,000

(Click on pics for full property details)

The Pain: Well, it’s in a pretty poor state and needs complete renovation – and that includes renewing the services (water, septic tank, mains electricity).

It’s Grade A listed – Grade I in England – so you will be restricted in what you can do.

The Scottish Offers Over system means it will probably fetch a lot more than £150,000 and the price of the renovation is estimated at around £60,000.

The Gain: This really is a one off – a unique and quirky home that looks a bit like a Chinese pavilion.

Some wonderful original features are still intact, notably the slate roof and the high piend-roofed portico at the front with undulating eaves and distinctive rustic log colonnades, painted in a striking red.

The underside of the portico is elaborately decorated and there are other unusual decorative elements in the stonework of the building. The agent reckons when finished it will be worth up to £250,000.

It’s most likely going to be a lifestyle purchase and would make a fantastic second home – the surrounding countryside is beautiful and there are numerous facilities to keep you entertained: nine and 18 hole golf courses, sailing and watersports, salmon and trout fishing on lochs and rivers, climbing and walking.

Rustic Lodge lies approximately 1.7 miles east of Kenmore, an 18th century planned settlement at the mouth of Loch Tay. The village provides local shopping, post office, hotel and church.

The Agent: Savills (Tel: 01738 477525)

Oh, we all love to be beside the seaside, as the famous ditty goes, so this week we’re taking a look at properties with sea views.

Since we’re not short on coastal locations in Britain, being an island and all, we’ve focused our attention on the South West corner, namely Devon and Cornwall, both of which are famed for their stunning beaches.

Although we’ve include a couple of top-priced examples to drool over, the good news is that you don’t have to spend a fortune for the privilege of being able to see the sea from the comfort of your own home.

Make the most of it, though, as a government plan has been mooted whereby extra council tax would be levied on properties with attractive views. Boo!

(Click on pics for full property details)

1. Torpoint, Cornwall
£1.5 million

2. Kingswear, Devon
£1.5 million (O.I.R.O.)

3. Preston, Devon
£399,950

4. Newquay, Cornwall
£245,000

5. Westward Ho!, Devon
£149,950

It’s no surprise to be told that a sea view will cost you. But how much more are vendors willing to pay?

The clever number-crunchers over at Savills have taken a look at the 12,000 sales that took place in Cornwall in 2008 and have come up with some very precise figures.

While there are significant variations around the average, depending on property type, location, and privacy, the heftiest premium is for detached properties within 100m of the coastline.

In 2008, these properties fetched a whopping average price of £525,168 while those between 100m and 250m from the coast averaged £460,585.

This means they come with premiums of as much as 85 per cent and 63 per cent respectively over comparable inland properties.

The premium often continues to be more than 50 per cent for properties between 100m and 250m of the coast, and although it tapers off beyond this distance there remains an average premium of 31 per cent within 1km of the coast.

I was wandering around the Neocribs blog the other day when I came across this … a hairy rough-hewn hunter-gatherer kind of a house in the middle of a Swedish forest.

Being Swedish, of course, it’s also beautifully designed – a perfectly pitched combination of Red Cedar wood shingles, Birch lattice, plasterwork, and reindeer fur.

Reindeer fur?? Yep, there’s a whole room clad with the stuff – and very snug, if slightly kinky, it looks too.

The building is an extension to an original cabin from the 1800s located on the shore of lake Övre Gla in the Glaskogen nature reserve in Sweden.

Wonder what would happen if you tried to get planning permission for a wildly experimental fur-lined cabin in the middle of a nature reserve in England…?

Copyright photographs courtesy of James Silverman

Project: Dragspelhuset at Övre Gla

Client: Fam. Zeisser Architect

Architect: 24H > architecture

I have to admit, before I started working at FindaProperty.com, I’d never heard of oast houses.

Maybe that’s because they’re mainly located in the South of England and I grew up many miles away in Scotland.  Or maybe it’s just because my architectural knowledge is somewhat lacking.

Whatever the reason, I’ve subsequently become a fan of these curious, conical-roofed structures, and think they’re a wonderful reminder of the bygone world of hop-farming in southern regions such as Kent and Sussex.

But hop-farming’s loss has been property’s gain, and since the 1960s, many former oast houses have been converted into beautiful and distinctive homes, with the added bonus of being part of England’s brewing history. Cheers to that!

Here are five glorious oast houses that are currently for sale (beer goggles not required):

(Click on pics for full property details)

1. Lamberhurst, East Sussex
£1,450,000

2. Crowhurst Oast, East Peckham, Kent
£ 650,000

3. Ightham, Kent
£1,000,000

4. Rural Matfield, Kent
£995,000

5. Rushlake Green, East Sussex
£450,000

If you’ve used Google today, you’ll have seen that it features a picture (a so-called Google Doodle) of a shower of meteors streaking across the night sky and … gulp! – heading straight for a defenceless house.

This is a reference to the Perseid meteor shower, coming to a night-time sky near you this evening - it should peak in the early hours (0100 GMT) of Wednesday 13 August, according to the Beeb.

But keep calm: this is not an oh-my-God-we’re-all-going-to-die-unless-Billy-Bob-Thornton-detonates-a-nuke-on-the-damn-thing kinda moment.

The meteor shower is made up of teenie tiny bits of full size earth-destroying meteor – it’s mere space dust burning up in our atmosphere, my friends, and definitely not apocalypse now – or even apocalypse very early tomorrow morning.

Which is just as well. Because if it was something bigger, it’s open to question whether your insurance company would shell out for you to rebuild your house.

I’ll grant you, insurance may seem beside the point what with life on Earth coming to an end, and all. But under-writers are nothing if not cautious – hence the fine print in some buildings insurance policies about Acts of God.

God in this case comes in the form of fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, tidal waves – basically, anything outside of human control.

But it could also mean your neighbour’s tree falling through your roof  in a storm. So check the fine print before you sign up: God may do large scale acts of random violence but the Devil is usually to be found in the insurance policy detail!

While we’re on the subject – here’s Bill Bailey riffing philosophically on the subject:

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There are lots of house price reports out there but only one will tell you how much sellers actually got for their properties: the Land Registry’s sold prices data.

In their latest report (June), they revealed that prices in England and Wales have risen for the first time in over a year.

It wasn’t a massive rise by any means (0.1 per cent) but regional figures show that the housing market is starting to recover: London rose by two per cent, the West Midlands by 0.5 per cent, the South West by 0.4 per cent and the South East by 0.3 per cent.

The market revival is being driven by lower interest rates and by the fact that prices are now 17 per cent off their peak in January 2008, but they’re also being supported by low supply and strong demand.

Our own figures show that stock levels in the sales market are down over 20 per cent year-on-year, but demand is surging.

Traffic to FindaProperty.com hit an all-time monthly high in July, and agents report intense competition for a limited supply of properties.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is good news for sellers.

It’s a situation that won’t last forever, so if you are considering selling don’t hang about – at the very least, it’s worth getting a few agents in to value your place: you could be pleasantly surprised by what they tell you.

Need a valuation? Search for a local estate agent on FindaProperty.com.

The DIY continues apace and am starting to worry I may be the noisiest flat owner on the South Coast …

I have met a few of my neighbours who had seen the TV programme (embarrassing) and everyone seems really nice. Which is a relief. Just to be safe, I dropped chocolates round to my immediate neighbours to apologise for the noise.

I didn’t want to fall out with them in the first week as we knocked down the wall and fireplace and covered the hallways with a thick layer of dust from sanding down the walls.

I had a bit of a result with the freeholders this week. I want to move the kitchen to the other side of the room to make a nice open-plan space (no idea where the money is coming from for this but will worry about that later) and I had to write to them with a plan of what I wanted to do.

I was expecting a fight on my hands but they said yes which I was so pleased about. Had to pay them £200 but I guess the lease papers will need to be updated, so fair enough.

I wasn’t expecting that to be so easy! Getting a sky dish on the roof past the building agents is proving a little trickier! No-one can see a dish on the roof but I have been told it is a conservation area. I don’t think the person who has put a sky dish up on the roof without permission is going to be very happy with me for bringing this to the managing agent’s attention. Oops.