Welcome to
THE DOGHOUSE
Dog friendly holiday cottage
The Doghouse is a dog friendly, one bedroom, comfy and cosy holiday cottage nestled in the countryside on the border of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire.
Home
The Doghouse is a dog friendly, one bedroom, comfy and cosy holiday cottage nestled in the countryside on the border of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire.
Home
The property stands on the site of a medieval deer park which went onto become Wicken Park estate. The original Wicken Park house was built by an ancestor of the late Diana, Princess of Wales around 1571 and the estate passed down through the Spencer family until around 1716 when it was sold and a new mansion was built. If you walk your dogs around the field at the bottom in front of our property, you will walk right past it.
In 1945, the estate was sold to the Society of Merchant Venturers who sold the mansion house on and it became Wicken Park School. It is still a school today and the sound of children playing often drifts across the field in the spring and early summer.
When my husband first moved here twenty seven years ago, The Doghouse was a draughty set of outbuildings and our house was an unloved pair of gamekeeper’s cottages in a state of disrepair. My husband put in a new roof, electrics and plumbing and decided it was probably a good idea to install a kitchen!
Then the lucky man met me, decided that he actually quite liked me and I was allowed to move in! That was two decades ago and in the intervening years we have been upgrading the interior of our home as and when…
The outbuildings consisted of a workshop and four kennels and were converted into a granny annexe in the late noughties. We removed the ceilings but retained the beams. The workshop was extended a little to make it into a good sized bedroom and we kept the original fireplace and its brick chimney which features in the sitting room and houses the flue from the wood burning stove.
The sitting room was created by removing the walls separating the kennels and we added patio doors, and a loo/shower room. The roomy kitchen was built on the footing of two of the dog-runs and used original bricks salvaged when the neighbouring ‘gardener’s’ cottage was demolished.
The little courtyard was formed by removing the wall and railing between the other two dog runs. The wall enclosing the courtyard is the original wall and is on your host’s list of things to upgrade although I’m not allowed to paint the original railings! Yet…
Considering its origin there was only, ever, one possible name for the cottage!