Some houses tell you about the people who built them. Snowshill tells you about the one person who filled it, room by room, with the most extraordinary collection of objects you will find anywhere in England. It sits in a quiet fold of hill near Broadway, about forty minutes from the cottage, and it rewards every minute of the drive.
Charles Paget Wade spent a lifetime gathering things: Japanese samurai armour, old bicycles, model ships, weaving tools, musical instruments, clocks that no longer keep time. He packed them into every room of this honey-coloured Tudor manor until there was barely space to turn around, then moved himself into a small cottage in the garden so the collection could have the house. The National Trust took it on in 1951, and mercifully they've kept it exactly as Wade left it. There are no tidy museum labels or roped-off corridors here. You wander from room to room as if you've stumbled into a very well-organised attic belonging to someone who found everything in the world interesting. Children love it, because there is always something new to spot in every corner, and adults love it for the same reason.
The terraced garden deserves time of its own. Wade designed it with the same care he gave to his collections, layering pools, borders, and quiet stone seats into the hillside. On a warm afternoon the views across the valley are beautiful, and the whole place has a stillness that feels hard-won in this part of the Cotswolds, where the tourist coaches tend to cluster. Snowshill sits just far enough off the main road to feel like a secret. The village itself is tiny, barely more than a handful of cottages, and the lane down to the manor winds through fields where you half expect to see nothing has changed since Wade first arrived. Pair it with a walk through Lavender fields in summer or a stop in Broadway for lunch, and you have one of the best days out this area can offer.
“It's the most wonderfully strange house in the Cotswolds. Every room feels like opening a different chapter of someone's brilliant, slightly unhinged imagination.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.