Pitlowie Cottage is one of those homes that’s a delight to explore.
While modern houses adopt a sensible but boring layout, Pitlowie has been added to repeatedly over its more than century-long existence.
The result is a sprawling house riddled with unique and wonderful features.
My favourite of these is found in one of the downstairs bedrooms. A door from the bedroom leads into a hall and then an en suite. There’s a bookcase in the hall. Push that and you discover it’s really a hidden door, leading into a dressing room measuring nearly 18sqm. It’s marvellous.
The house is nestled in a quiet, private slice of Perthshire countryside. I took the exit at Glendoick Garden Centre, and a couple of miles driving up into the hills brought me to it.
Its owner sadly passed away and his former business partner Caroline Gown shows me around.
It’s a good thing I have a guide as I could easily get lost in this house.
All told, there’s an enormous 365sqm of living space in the main house with an additional 52sqm in the office/gym. That’s complemented by garden, paddock and woodland spanning just shy of 10 acres.
On the ground floor is a semi-open plan kitchen, dining and sunroom. There’s also a living room, a sunroom and study, as well as four bedrooms, including the one with the hidden dressing room.
The previous owner extended into the attic space, adding a fantastic master bedroom suite, which only requires a kitchenette to be virtually a self-contained flat. There’s a bedroom area, room for a sofa and chairs, and a stunning en suite, with banks of Velux windows positioned so you can look up at the stars from the freestanding copper bathtub.
Alarmingly, the partition wall appears to be made from glass, but the flick of a switch turns it from clear to blank white to protect privacy – a nice use of technology in an old home.
There’s a fifth bedroom upstairs and three balconies – two off the master suite and one off the spare bedroom.
The garden is no less interesting than the house. Numerous paths wind up the hillside, depositing you at seating areas cunningly placed to trap the sunshine at all hours of the day.
Tucked away in one corner is the gym and office. Made from timber, it has a sauna, steam room, gym area, and a large office with custom-made desk and units. Power, light and water mean buyers could potentially turn this into annex accommodation.
There’s also a large brick garage as well as plenty of car parking space. A separate gate gives access to the paddock, and the rest of the ground is hill and woodland.
It may not be conventional, but Pitlowie Cottage is unique and very special indeed.
Pitlowie Cottage, Pitroddie, is on sale with Bell Ingram for o/o £625,000.