We hadn’t planned to be house hunting in Wiltshire. My husband and I had been trying to upsize from our small flat in Shepherd’s Bush to a house nearby with a garden. Everything we’d gone to see had been bleakly wrong — too expensive, too dark, too small. We wondered, was it normal to feel so despondent about buying a house?
It was September and we’d taken our small children to stay with my parents-in-law in rural south-west Wiltshire, where my husband grew up. We sat in the garden in the autumn light, talking about our house-hunting woes. Swallows were darting from the roof eaves, I could hear a blackbird; and my husband joked, maybe we should just move to Wiltshire? I looked at him. Actually, maybe we should?
That afternoon, I googled a local estate agent. He said there was one house coming back on the market after a sale had fallen through. We could take a look today, if we liked. We hadn’t got plans, and the baby could nap in the car, so we thought, why not? It would be fun to pretend.
We followed the map across rolling valleys. It was the tail-end of a hot summer, and it started to rain. The fields of scorched ochre shimmered. A line of copper beech trees stood sentry as we turned into a dead-end road. We took it slowly over potholes, and pulled up at the side of the lane outside an old stone cottage with a red tiled roof and two pear trees growing espalier up the front. It was raining hard and we unstrapped the children and carried them, covered in our coats, up a path of broken paving to the front door. The estate agent was waiting for us, a country gent in corduroys and a gilet.
I had a strange feeling that made me slightly catch my breath as he turned the key in the door. Had I been here before? It felt familiar, resonant, somehow already known to me.
We looked around the cottage, opening cupboards loose on their hinges, and tentatively peering around doorways. It smelt musty and abandoned, every room containing part of a half-disassembled existence. It had a strong feeling of a life once vigorously lived but departed; the carpets worn to rags, greasy handprints up the staircase, ghostly frames on the wall where pictures had hung. The estate agent briskly told us that the elderly woman who owned it, Barbara, had already moved out, into a bungalow in a nearby village.
We were both silent on the drive back to my parents-in-law, neither of us quite ready to say what we both felt. My mother-in-law — always perceptive of these things — could read my expression as we got out of the car.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Was it that good?” Yes. It was.
I called the estate agent and could picture him scrunching his face when I told him how much we could offer. There were many others who would be offering much higher, he said. It would likely go to best and final offers and it was unlikely we’d be successful.
I lay in bed thinking of that darkly cosseting woodland surrounding the cottage, a dense patchwork of green; I thought of the great pine tree in the garden, watching over the house protectively. I thought of birds nesting in the eaves, the quiet bats in the roof and the view from the kitchen window, of intersecting curves of field, hedge and sky. I felt a pang of longing.
How could I make it mine without a bottomless pit of money?
And then it came to me. I could write a letter. I chose the card for Barbara carefully: a Wiltshire landscape by Eric Ravilious, verdant chalk downland, country lanes, farmland and big, billowing clouds. I wrote with a fountain pen, and I told her about us, and why she should choose me.
I wrote the letter of a lifetime, and sealed our fate in an envelope.
Barbara told the estate agent she’d like to meet me. I put the baby in the car seat and drove down the A303 one November morning. I brought her some of my mother’s homemade crab apple jelly, and we sat in Barbara’s kitchen, surrounded by a life boxed up in cardboard, talking about the life she had lived there, and the one I would live.
Barbara gave me a book that day, The Rose Expert, from 1964, by DG Hessayon, with handwritten notations inside about what to do with her roses, when to cut them back and how. On the title page was her name, written in curly handwriting. She had crossed it out, and written my name underneath.
What is it about handwritten letters that have such power? I’m not the first person to have written a letter in an attempt to convince someone to sell them their house, because it often works.
“It’s not going to work on every seller,” says Charlie Stone, director of country house sales at Rural View estate agency. “But for those clients who feel emotional about the sale of their house, who have perhaps lived there for a very long time, who are downsizing or finding the idea of moving on difficult, they want to feel the new owner has fallen in love with their house. They want to like who they are selling to.”
Jenna Travers, an independent property search agent, has found personal letters to be transformative. “Letter writing is not a lost art,” she says. “A handwritten letter can be helpful in giving a seller an insight into who they are selling to, and I encourage all my clients to do it. Only last week a vendor agreed to sell £200,000 below the asking price to a client who had written to them. In their letter they explained how they were local to the area, their children would be raised in the village, it would live on as a family home. That mattered to the seller.”
There is some interesting psychology in it, argues Justin Marking, executive director of Savills. “Some vendors like the idea of selling to younger versions of themselves,” he says. Many people who sell family homes that they have owned a long time particularly value that sense of gentle continuity. “If you write in your letter that you’ll keep on their beloved old gardener, that might well be the clincher.”
“Selling a home can feel like a great loss,” says clinical psychologist Sophie Mort, author of (Un)Stuck (Gallery UK, £10.99). “Selling to someone who resembles your younger self can symbolise a passing on of a legacy, and by projecting your own memories on to that person, you can relive those happy times.”
Letters are particularly powerful at transmitting an emotional message and connecting on a human level, and have an ability to transcend the purely financial matters of house buying. “Letters convey authenticity and sincerity,” says Mort, “which fosters deeper connections than digital communications, making the homeowner feel they really know the buyer”.
Joan DiFuria, psychologist at the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, agrees. “The power of a handwritten letter is its ability to evoke strong emotions; it is tangible and can be kept and revisited. A letter makes the recipient feel special and valued as it shows that the sender really cares.”
For the letter writer, the process of writing a love letter to a house can also be helpful, says DiFuria. “The writing of a letter can be emotionally cathartic as a way to process thoughts and feelings and gain clarity,” she says. “It may even help the writer really follow through on those goals of how they want to live.”
The letter that Georgie Everett, a teacher in Hampshire, wrote to the owners of the house she wanted so badly was not an easy one to write, as it was so personal. “I just went for it, and wrote the honest, heartfelt truth,” she says. “I wrote that I had grown up on a farm nearby, and that since the early deaths of both my parents I had felt this strong pull back to my roots. I longed to come back to this part of the world and I wanted to give my children the childhood I had.” Unsurprisingly, they sold her the house.
For a buyer, writing a personal letter can also be a way to claw back a sense of control in what can be a disempowering and brutally transactional process, and when relying on estate agents has been fruitless. If you don’t ask, you don’t get and, really, what have you got to lose?
After being outbid on three houses which had gone to best and final offers, Kate Willcocks, a psychologist, took matters into her own hands, wrote a letter and flyered three entire roads in the Bristol area where she was trying to buy — 250 houses in all. “I had a call that evening from Tony at number 11,” she says. “He said he was just walking out of the door to the estate agent when my flyer came through the letter box.” Fate or luck, it worked. She bought Tony’s house in a private sale.
Ten years have passed since I wrote the letter that changed the course of my life. We painted over the height measurements of Barbara’s children and grandchildren on the kitchen wall, and my own boys’ names are marked there now at increments chronicling our decade here.
My children were babies, then toddlers, little boys with muddy knees, and now are starting secondary school. They had baths in the big sink, rode their bikes up and down the lane and climbed up to the tree house built by Barbara’s grandson.
I cut back the pear trees hard every winter like she told me; I’ve looked after her roses, and planted more. When we have made small changes to the house over the years, I’ve always thought of her, and hoped she would have approved. In that letter I wrote to her, I promised I would be a careful custodian of her beloved house. I told her I would love it and live a full, rich and happy life in it, and I have. It was a letter from my heart, and I meant every word.
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