Heathland Studio Sells Before Auction Day

Heathland Studio never made it to the rostrum. Lot 6 in our November Livestream Auction, guided at £800,000 to £1,000,000, has sold prior to auction above the guide.

A house inside the Heath

The Vale of Health is a small hamlet set entirely within Hampstead Heath, reached by a single lane off East Heath Road. Our office is on Frognal, a short walk away, so this one felt close to home.

Heathland Studio is a freehold semi-detached building arranged as two one bedroom flats over lower ground, ground and first floors. It has a cellar, a large wrap around garden with side access and a private roof terrace. It was offered with vacant possession and room for a buyer to reshape it, subject to the usual consents.

How a marsh became an address

Until the late eighteenth century this corner of the Heath was boggy ground known as Hatchett’s Bottom. In 1777 the Hampstead Water Company dammed a pond here to drain it. By 1801 the name Vale of Health was in use, possibly as a deliberate change of image. It stuck.

The Vale went on to draw writers and thinkers. Leigh Hunt lived here after his release from prison. Rabindranath Tagore stayed at 3 Villas on the Heath in 1912, the year before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A blue plaque marks the house.

Writers and painters

From 1901 to 1912 the house was known as Heathland Lodge and was home to George Calderon and his wife Kittie. It was built in the 1860s and remodelled in the 1890s by the Arts and Crafts architect George Birch, with at least fifteen rooms opening straight onto the Heath. Calderon was a playwright and translator whose versions of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard helped introduce Chekhov to British audiences. He joined up in 1914 at the age of 45 and was killed at Gallipoli in June 1915.

For decades the house was home to two sisters, Janis and Hilary Hardiman, daughters of the sculptor Alfred Hardiman RA, whose Earl Haig memorial stands on Whitehall. Hilary was an actress. Janis trained at Central St Martins and Camberwell, moved to the Vale in 1953 and painted the Heath, the local allotments and her own garden from this house. Her work stayed largely private until an exhibition in Islington in 2019 brought it to a wider audience.

The neighbours

The Vale has always kept interesting company. Next door, Chestnut Cottage was owned for generations by a family of Hampstead chimney sweeps. Local legend has it that Charles Kingsley, walking across the Heath, saw their sweeps’ boys playing by the pond and found the idea for The Water-Babies. From 1951 the cottage was home to George Coulouris, who played the banker Walter Parks Thatcher in Citizen Kane.

Fleet House, at the end of the lane, is said to have been built around 1890 for the actress Olga Nethersole. It was later home to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr and then to Louis Heren, deputy editor of The Times. Stanley Spencer lived and painted for a time at the old Vale of Health Hotel, before it was demolished in the 1960s.

Why it sold early

A house like this has no comparable on the next street, which makes a fixed asking price a guess. Auction lets the market decide. Buyers had the legal pack, a guide and a date to work to. In this case the right buyer moved before the date arrived.

Own something with a story?

A period house that needs work, a building that does not fit a standard listing or a home that has been in the family for decades. These are the properties we enjoy selling most. Our free auction valuation tells you what yours could achieve and how quickly.

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