• An idyllic country house remains most people's dream
• Supply, apart from the early 90s, has always lagged behind demand
• Increasing internationalisation of the country market
• Rise in local wealth driving up prices in key areas such as Oxford and Newbury
• 'Commuter' areas now extend much further from London due primarily to more sophisticated communications
• Prices are linked to the increase in London property - premiums for the very best
• Market looks strong - even if London weakens - because of lack of supply

Scratch the surface of an Englishman and you will find a country squire. It is embedded into the genetic code as firmly as the colour of his hair. You see evidence of it wherever you look, from magazine shelves collapsing under the weight of titles extolling a bucolic ideal, to the perennial love affair with the Colefax and Fowler look. It runs from Fulham to Falmouth and has reinvented itself on Fifth Avenue under the logo of Ralph Lauren. Ask the Goldman Sachs workaholic what he wants at the end of his time in the trenches and, if he can still remember, at the top of his dreamtime wish list will be parkland, wisteria and the sound of water.

In the seventeen years we have been in business, this dream seems only to have grown in intensity and desirability. Apart from the occasional new house the supply has been static with the single exceptional year of 1991/92 when deep recession met the Lloyd's debacle which resulted in an excess of supply over demand, making it the only year - either before or since - where this has been the case. When buyers in London complain that there is nothing to buy, what they really mean is that they are not spoilt for choice - but you only have to compromise a little to get what you want. In the country, you either have to wait a lot longer or compromise a great deal more, because when people buy in the country, they generally buy for life. Unfortunately, the grim reaper, the divorce lawyer, or the bailiff can get in the way of these plans, and it is usually only these gentlemen that force a sale. Roots tend to be planted rather deeper in the country - after all, who plants trees in London?

While the supply and demand situation is as it ever was, there have been a number of subtle changes in the country market that we have noticed during our years in the business, the principal one being the internationalisation of buyers. England has always had it's share of expatriates who for some reason love our climate and even our food: notwithstanding that the French seem rarely to succumb to these charms (as the French saying goes, 'If it's cold it's soup, if it's warm it's beer'). What has changed is that there are now many more international folk who want a house in the English countryside to add to the chalet in Switzerland and the flat in Hong Kong, while home will probably always be in Des Moines, Iowa. Fifteen years ago, these buyers rarely went west of Ascot and, even then, only if they made it west of Harrods.

This process is connected to the rise of UK plc. The vast bulk of the buyers we came across in the early days were connected with the City -not surprising really, as that was where the money was. It's still there, but nowadays, for every banker with a bonus, there is a computer entrepreneur with a fistful of share options who wants to live next to the shop - which is in or around towns like Newbury and Oxford. He's probably a local but, whereas fifteen years ago he may have worked for a brewery and then a long-distance sales trip was to Leicester, today it's Microsoft and the trip is to Seattle, so Heathrow really matters. This has brought a profound and noticeable change to the local economy of the Thames Valley, its inhabitants, and the prices people have to pay who want to commute or weekend in that area.

Commuting itself has changed. About half the clients we worked for in the early eighties were commuters and their targets were stations like Newbury, Winchester, Didcot and Basingstoke. Again, they worked in the City but the pre-Big Bang City was a more relaxed place than it is now. The caricature of the ten o 'clock start, the long lunch and the down train at five was long gone but it wasn't, as a rule, a seven a.m. start and a midnight deadline either. Also, the centre of gravity of the City has shifted eastwards to the towers of Canary Wharf, adding another twenty minutes on to a commute that is already long enough if you are coming through Waterloo or Paddington. For most people, it has made the day just too long and many commuters spend a couple of nights in London either in a rented room or a pied-a-terre.

As a result, another sort of commuter is now changing the pattern of house-buying in the country, moving into areas that were previously not considered commutable. These are buyers who are not chained to the five-day week - or rather those who don' t need to spend those five days in the same office. As a rule, this does not include those who have sold themselves to investment banks - banks like to see and feel their pound of flesh - but rather those who either own their own business or who are sufficiently senior to write their own rules. They are now able to do this because of mobile phones, sophisticated computer links and telephone systems that give no clue as to whether you are calling Bishopsgate or Banbury. It is hard to remember that, when we started in 1983, the waiting list for a business line in Kensington was nearly a year.

What this has meant is that these buyers are no longer weekenders or commuters but a hybrid, whose children are at school in the country and who work from home one or two days a week. They no longer need to be ten minutes from Basingstoke but can range far and wide into areas previously considered too far to commute. South Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Warwickshire - previously 'county' rather than 'commuter' areas are now on the radar screen and prices have been reflecting that change.

These prices, which leave the traditional locals with watering eyes, are no more than a reflection of what has been going on in the London market. A medium sized Kensington house now costs nearly £2m and houses in Notting Hill, on communal gardens, regularly sell for more than £3.5. There are plenty of them around which is more than can be said for the country equivalent, so when the farm house with a hundred acres near Salisbury appears, it is not being valued any longer on its ability to produce milk, but rather on its views and the distance from the nearest noisy road.

Some buyers who have made the move to the country read the metropolitan papers with reports of escalating house prices and anxiously wonder whether their investment in rural bricks, mortar and land would have been better left in Holland Park. They should rest easy. The FPF Savills index for Prime London has gone up 111% since mid-1993 while the Prime Country House index has risen by 110% over the same period. Savills represents a much wider market than the one we cover as they are dealing with houses overlooking cement-works as well as those with fewer flaws, which is our universe.

Anecdotally, we reckon that our market has moved more. A house in Gloucestershire that sold for £1.3m in 1993 has recently sold for £3.5m - both times in good condition. This is an increase of 170%. This quality differential is mirrored in London: houses in Scarsdale Villas, a street of medium-sized properties, have moved from about £700,000 to nearly £2m over the same period, while larger properties, in £1m are now nearer £2.6m. The days of the Kensington doctor are well over - unless he has a profitable practice removing cellulite in Harley Street.

Are these trends in the country likely to continue? Of course, there may be a recession and the London market may follow the Footsie into a trough but the baby-boomers are still dreaming and their children are only young once. The froth may well be blown off the London market but is has got to fall a long way before it will dent country prices in a significant way. The farming crisis may produce more supply over the next few years but the current demand would more than soak up any such increase. It is likely to remain a market where the redfaced squire is being increasingly replaced by the red-braced banker.

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