The council has helped with the landscaping of the garden which includes a temple and

The council has helped with the landscaping of the garden, which includes a temple, and has been a good source of expert craftsmen. There are fears that such partnerships may not survive the merger of Bath City Council into a broader local authority.When Jane and Nick arrived at Batheaston they wrote to their new neighbours, explaining their planned restoration and apologising in advance for any inconvenience caused by builders. They received back a series of affectionate responses which underlined the community sense that the house belonged to more than just its new owners. "This is an example of the grants system at its best," Jane says.

"The house matters to Bath and it matters to us."With half our housing stock now over 50 years old it is not just 18th- and 19th-century residences that need to be refurbished; many houses built in the 1920s and 1930s are starting to deteriorate. Perhaps the fashion among the next generation of refurbishers will be to colonise suburban estates of semi-detached homes and use grant money to restore their original features.. Fulbeck House is in a part of England where you still get a lot of property for your money. This listed property, dating from 1700, has five bedrooms and four reception rooms as well as two self-contained wings currently rented out. Humberts in Grantham (01476 76133) is asking pounds 375,000 for the house and gardens. In the grounds are a cottage, and a coach house and walled garden They are offered as a separate lot for pounds 100,000.

For what it's worth It takes, on average, nearly five months to sell a house in England, according to this month's Home Report from Black Horse Agencies. The national average hides huge discrepancies between regions, with properties selling far quicker in the South than the North. In the South-east and East Anglia the average selling time is about three months, compared with seven months in the North-west. In the South-west the figure is four months, in the North-east it is five months. Property priced realistically is likely to sell quickest and for a figure closer to the asking price. Houses sold within two months by the agency's 340 branches went for 93 per cent of the asking price compared with 85 per cent for houses which took a year to sell.. "This one's a bit Mongolian, with shamanic overtones.

It derives very much from the nomadic concept," says Brian Monger, gesturing towards his home. "It's the most complex one I've built." Mr Monger's home, from the outside, resembles nothing so much as a rather large and faded tent, which squats with 15 others in the middle of a remote field in East Pennard, Somerset. Inside, however, it is almost Byzantine in its splendour: its frame created by branches knitted together in semi-Gothic intricacy, spraying out from the centre and bearing its weight on sapling buttresses. Arranged around its wheeled centre are four rooms, semi-domes from which windows highlight small altars of curios. Heavy wall hangings, rugs and floor cushions give the room something of the air of a Bedouin tent, while the wood-burning stove in the corner and accompanying teapot suggest something a little more English. The smell is sheepskin, patchouli and wood smoke and, compared to the sharp chill of the open field outside, decidedly cosy."Some of the others are more functional," says Mr Monger, of his "bender", as he refers to his self-built, semipermanent home "Especially those belonging to single men. But this is a family home."Mr Monger, his partner Christine Boal and their two children have lived as part of the Kingshill Collective - a group of 20 or so "alternative dwellers" - for the past three years. Just over 20 months ago the Collective arranged a mortgage with a local farmer to buy a field, to set up an "experimental sustainable living system" which would minimise its use of the earth's resources, and provide its members and their children with what they see as a better, less polluted way of life."Only the very rich or the very poor get to live in a home they have built themselves," says Mr Monger, who previously inhabited a flat in Peckham.