The agency
On knowing a coast well
Our story
Marlow & West began with a refusal. We had both spent years inside larger agencies and grown tired of the language — the houses that all stunningly boasted the same things, the viewings conducted by people who had never opened a window in the place. We thought a coastline as particular as this one deserved better, and that the people moving here did too.
So we started small, in a single room above a chandlery, with a handful of houses and a rule that we would only ever represent places we understood. We learned the difference between the morning light at Sandbanks and the long evening light over the Purbeck hills. We learned which lanes flood and which gardens hold the warmth. We learned, slowly, to be useful.
In the years since we have sold some of the finest houses on the Dorset coast — waterfront and walled, modern and centuries old — but the method has not changed. We still see every house ourselves. We still write every word ourselves. We still believe that the right house found by the right person is one of the quiet, good things a life can contain.
We are not the largest agency on this coast, and we have no wish to be. We are simply the one that knows it best.
£480m
of homes sold
11 years
on this coast
40–50
houses a year, by choice
92%
sold to buyers we already knew
The people
Eleanor Marlow
Founder & Principal
Eleanor founded the agency on the unfashionable belief that fewer houses, properly understood, beats more houses sold in a hurry. She has worked this coast for two decades and still insists on writing every house’s account herself.
Thomas West
Founder & Principal
Thomas handles the long middle of a sale — the part between offer and completion where most transactions quietly come apart. He is unflappable, fond of period houses, and a fierce reader of surveys.
Iris Pelham
Head of Sales
Iris knows the buyers before they know themselves what they want. She runs our considered list with discretion and a long memory, and she has never once described a house as stunning.
Daniel Croft
Property & Photography
Daniel makes the record — the photographs in honest light, the floor plans true to the inch, the writing that tells you what a house is and isn’t. He waits for the right weather, which tries everyone’s patience and is always worth it.
Sophie Aldridge
Client Care
Sophie is the steady voice at the other end of the phone through the parts of a move nobody warns you about. She keeps solicitors honest, calendars accurate, and clients reassured.