cotswolds, england
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In a churchyard about 160 miles west of London, the rain falls at a 45-degree angle, slamming down on the stone pavement and bouncing off in white fluff that floats just below the ankles.
St Mary’s Church is the 14th-century core of Painswick, a Cotswold town in southwest England famous for its hills and honey-colored cottages. It’s a Jane Austen-esque, almost eerie hunk of England that has long attracted tourists and home buyers, sometimes despite the weather.
But local real estate agents recently told CNN that more Americans are calling it home.
Those agents say some want to send their children to prestigious British schools and universities. Some people seek an idyllic, slow-paced life. Some feel compelled to leave the United States due to the threat of wildfires, gun violence, or political changes they oppose. Most are incredibly wealthy.
Frances Schulz, a North Carolinian in her 60s who bought a cottage in the Cotswolds in 2023, told CNN: “I feel weird, like I’ve been thrown into the middle of a very wholesome and sweet BBC series.”
It’s a long-held ambition for Schulz, a journalist and author who writes about homes and interior design. She described her life as a surrogate through the pages of Country Life, a British real estate magazine filled with glossy photos of manor houses and their acres.
A divorce in 2022 gave Schulz the boost he needed, and he soon bought a four-bed cottage just down the road from St. Mary’s Church. “It was love at first sight,” she said of her new home.
Katie Campbell, Mr. Schulz’s purchasing agent (a type of real estate agent who searches for properties and negotiates prices on behalf of buyers), told CNN that the number of American clients has increased by 20% in the past year.
Historically, the majority of these customers already live in the UK (usually London) to purchase rural boltholes. Now, Campbell said she is fielding more calls from Americans based in the U.S. and is getting used to their preferences.
They typically buy second, third or fourth homes for anywhere from £1 million ($1.3 million) to “tens of millions”. They want coziness (think Kate Winslet’s cottage in the movie The Holiday, but much more spacious) and they want discretion. “They may wander around the village, but people don’t really turn around or stare at them,” she added. “So you can be completely incognito in the Cotswolds.”
Campbell, of course, won’t name names, but said some of his customers “come from a movie background.”
The Cotswolds span several of England’s “shires” and are dotted with some of Britain’s biggest names. David Beckham regularly posts pictures of his life at his Oxfordshire mansion on Instagram, including making honey and digging for vegetables. Kate Moss has been photographed walking around the same shire in muddy boots since the early 2000s.
American celebrities are also paying attention. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres moved to the Cotswolds from California in 2024 and helped bring the region to international attention. Vice President J.D. Vance spent part of his family vacation in the Cotswolds this summer.
Mr. Schultz will spend his summers in Painswick and the rest of the year in New York City. Although she once owned a holiday home in the Hamptons (a high-profile vacation spot for the city’s elite that has been compared to the London-Cotswold axis), she chose the relatively simple Painswick.
“This small town is full of character, just like the small town I grew up in in North Carolina,” she said, adding that she leaves plenty of time to visit the local library, expecting to stop for a few conversations along the way.
“The Hamptons are more fickle,” Schultz said. “(It’s) more glamorous, more sociable, dressier, more sophisticated. And the Cotswolds, even the upmarket Cotswolds, are much more modest.”
Find out why Americans are drawn to this picturesque part of the English countryside
The average home in the Cotswolds sold for around £440,000 (about $590,000) in the past 12 months, about two-thirds more than the UK average, according to property website Rightmove.
Buying agent Harry Gladwin said he noticed an increase in inquiries from the United States late last year. It has risen about 30% since then, with some customers citing politics as a key motivator for relocating, he noted.
About a fifth of Gladwin’s customers are now American, and some of them were already based in the UK. They typically have a budget of between £6 million ($8 million) and £8 million ($10.8 million) and are drawn to the history of the homes on offer. Mr Gladwin said he recently helped an American client purchase a manor house built in the 1300s.
“I think what many Americans particularly love about Britain is its great history,” he said. “The stories behind all these houses…and the fact that they can own a little bit of history.”
Penn State’s Lauren Neely is a student of that history.
The 35-year-old historical fiction writer moved to Painswick with her husband and two children six months ago. For many years, the couple dreamed of moving to the UK after spending an unforgettable university semester in Scotland. So when a job opportunity arose for her husband near Painswick, they jumped at it.
The family rents a former four-bed carriage house in the center of town. “I think it’s from the 1700s,” Neely said. “[It]has these beautiful archways where you can see where the three horse-drawn carriages would have been.” She describes it as “modest” compared to other properties nearby.
“We don’t come from generations of wealth or high privilege, especially like some people here in the Cotswolds,” she added.
Neely is writing a novel set in the 1400s, drawing inspiration from Painswick’s history and occasionally indulging in writerly superstitions by venturing through St Mary’s Churchyard. “Sometimes I stop there in the morning after I put the kids on the bus and just take a moment and touch the stones and it completely transports me back.”
Neely is enjoying her new life in Painswick. She said her husband and son are passionate about local soccer and believes locally grown food improves her family’s health.
She hasn’t ruled out returning to the United States someday. Still, Neely said, “There’s not a lot we’re missing out on.”
