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Waterhouse

Limpley Stoke, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire

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The northern façade of Waterhouse; photograph from Wikimedia

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Waterhouse is an ashlar-faced late 18th century house next to the Midford Brook, which forms the boundary between Limpley Stoke in Wiltshire with Monkton Combe in Somerset. There was an earlier house here which was part of the lands sold by the Earl of Clanricard in 1615 to Richard Dicke of Turleigh, in Winsley. Some of this may remain as there is a datestone of 1632 and initial I.D, probably of John Dicke. When Richard Dicke’s estates in Limpley Stoke were divided between his three sons, the Waterhouse part became the property of his 3rd son George (died in 1668) and passed down in the family until it was inherited in 1783 by Henry Fisher and continued in the Fisher family. In 1838 it was bought by Henry Toogood Davis, who was in 1846 a promoter of a railway linking Bristol to Dover which would have passed the house, but was never built.

In 1876 the house, Brett Farm further up the valley and about 140 acres of land were bought at auction in Bath for £7,000 by Johnson Frederick Hayward He had gone to South Australia in 1846, made a fortune, came back in 1864 and lived in Aroona House in Limpley Stoke, which he named after his former sheep station. He died in 1912 aged 90.

It was purchased in 1946 by Rev Percy Warrington and opened as a residential home for the elderly and was extended in 1983. The Warrington Homes Charitable Trust sold it in 2009 to the Wilsher Trust (now the Wilsher Group, founded by Simon Wilsher in 1990) and it became a business training centre and 33-bedroom hotel.

On 24 March 2021, the house/hotel was advertised for sale at offers of over £2,750,000.

Waterhouse, Brook Cottage (formerly Waterhouse Farm, next door, to the west) and the 19th century barn at Brett Farm are each listed buildings, Grade II.