Easons Stables, Palehouse Common, Uckfield

Some houses are built. This one was earned.

The barn was raised in the early 1900s, put up for horses and pigs and the working life of the farm around it. It has stood through a century of Sussex weather, and it has the bones to prove it. What has happened over the last few years is the good part. Someone took the building seriously. The brickwork was kept and put on show. The beams were kept, cleaned and left where the men who cut them set them. The comfort has been fitted around the barn rather than the barn being fitted around the comfort, and that is a rarer thing than the market pretends.

You arrive through your own gates, with the field lying open to the front and the garage building set to one side. Two acres in all. Before you have opened the door you understand what you are buying, because the land announces itself first.

Inside, the barn gives you its best room straight away. The living room, dining area and kitchen run together as one open space beneath the vaulted roof, with the original beams overhead and the old brick warm along the walls. It is a room with height and generosity in it. You can seat 10 for lunch and still have somewhere to sit afterwards. You can cook while the conversation carries on around you, which is how people actually live now, and the whole room turns towards whoever is doing the talking.

The present owners describe Christmas here with real affection. A proper tree, the sort you have to carry in sideways. Nobody exiled to a galley kitchen while everyone else has the fun. The whole day happening in one great, beamed, well lit room. That is the measure of a house. Not the specification, but what it does to the occasions.

Three double bedrooms follow, all on one level. One opens off the living space, which makes an elegant guest room or a study with the best proportions in the house. A hallway leads to the family bathroom and to the two remaining bedrooms, among them the principal room with its own en-suite shower room. There are no stairs anywhere in the building. It is a house you can move through easily at any age, which is why it appeals as readily to a family with young children as to somebody who has done the big house and wants the good bits without the climbing.

Then the outside, which is the real story here.

The formal garden is broad and laid to lawn, running away from the barn towards the trees at the far end. It is a garden waiting for its gardener. Whatever you have been sketching on the back of envelopes for the last ten years, there is room for it here. Deep herbaceous borders. A walled kitchen garden with beans up canes and a cutting bed for the house. An orchard of Sussex apples. A tennis court, if that is your family. The lawn is a blank sheet of the best kind, and a garden you make yourself is the only kind that ever really belongs to you.

At the bottom of the garden stands the cabin, with power and light laid on. It is far enough from the house to be genuinely its own place. Therapists and counsellors will see it immediately, because a client can arrive, be met and leave without ever crossing your kitchen. Writers and painters will see it too. So will anyone who has spent three years working at the end of the dining table and dreaming of a door that shuts.

And beyond the garden lies the field. This is what turns a handsome house into a way of living. Two acres gives you room for hens scratching about behind wire, for a pair of ponies, for pigs if you fancy completing the circle the barn began with. It gives you space for a polytunnel and rows of vegetables that make the weekly shop half of what it was. It gives you a wildflower meadow cut once a year, or an orchard, or simply a great sweep of green with a table set out in it in June and your children running the length of it until the light goes. The good life is a phrase people use loosely. Here the raw material for it is sitting in front of you, fenced and waiting.

To the front, the purpose built triple garage and workshop is a building in its own right, with power and light already run. Three cars under cover. A restoration project up on axle stands with the doors open on a Saturday. Motorcycles, a workbench, timber, the lawnmower and the trailer, and still room to move around them. It makes handsome premises for a business too, subject to the necessary consents, and there is parking on the gravel for as many cars as you will ever have arriving at once.

The setting completes it. The barn is quietly placed, semi rural and properly off the beaten track, backing and siding on to farmland with cattle grazing beyond the boundary through the summer. You get the sounds of the countryside and the dark skies that come with them. You get a view that belongs to a working farm and will go on looking as it does now. It sits close to Framfield, with the villages, lanes and country of this corner of East Sussex all around.

A converted barn, done properly. Two acres of your own. A workshop, a garden studio and a field with the gate open. Very few houses offer the life as well as the address. This one does.

Tenure: Freehold
Rights & easements: Shared driveway