The house on the slope

In the 1890s the western slope of Hampstead was still mostly fields and orchards, owned by a handful of old estates. As the railway brought the city closer, the land was sold in large plots to families who wanted a house in the country that was still within reach of town.

This house was built in 1898 for Walter Greaves, a publisher, and his wife Edith, a keen gardener. Their architect worked in red brick and clay tile, in the style that would later be called Arts and Crafts: deep porches, leaded windows and a hall floor laid in patterned tiles. Most of those details survive.

The garden is the unusual part. When the plot was divided, the neighbouring houses were given gardens of a normal length. The Greaves family bought an extra strip at the bottom, where an orchard already stood, and refused to have the trees cut down. Edith planted the terraces nearest the house herself and left the lower ground to the apples.

The result is a garden in three levels: a stone terrace outside the kitchen, a long lawn below it, and at the bottom an orchard of old trees that still fruit every autumn. From the lawn, with the trees in leaf, it is hard to see another house.

In 1921 the family added the conservatory, and in 2015 the present owners brought the house up to date with new services and a kitchen opening onto the terrace, while keeping the staircase, the windows and the tiled hall exactly as they were.

More than a century on, the house is still what it was built to be: a family house on a hill, with the country at the end of the garden.