an arts-and-crafts house set back behind the pines of branksome park

Built in 1908 and barely altered in its bones, the house sits well back from the road on one of Branksome Park's older plots, screened by a stand of Scots and maritime pines that were mature long before the present owners arrived. You come to it slowly, along a gravel sweep that bends past rhododendron and holly, and the elevations reveal themselves in pieces: a deep clay-tiled roof carried low over the eaves, tile-hung gables, leaded casements set in oak, and a brick-and-render front that has weathered to the colour of the trunks around it. It is recognisably the work of a builder schooled in the Arts and Crafts manner — honest materials, a roofline that does the talking, no ornament that isn't also doing a job.

Inside, the proportions are generous without being grand. A galleried hall with its original oak staircase opens to a drawing room running the depth of the house, where an inglenook fireplace and a wide south-west bay draw the afternoon light off the garden. The dining room keeps its panelling and a second hearth; a third reception, quieter, looks into the pines and would serve as a study or library. The kitchen has been opened to a garden room at the rear, the one frank concession to how a house is lived in now, glazed along its southern wall so the cooking and the eating happen within sight of the lawn. Five bedrooms occupy the upper floors, the principal with a dressing room and a view that ends in trees rather than neighbours.

The gardens are the long argument for the place — a little under an acre, established over a century, with lawns falling away beneath the pine canopy and mature azalea, camellia and acer beneath. There is a kitchen garden behind a brick wall, a timber garden store, and the particular hush that comes of a plot this size set among other plots this size. The chines and the beach at Branksome lie a walk away through the wooded roads; the centre of Poole and the Sandbanks ferry are a short drive. It is a house that asks to be kept, not redrawn.