Six months on the market with one of the most respected agents in London, then a sale agreed with Hortons in eight days.
Half a year without a sale usually means the wrong people are looking at a house. It rarely means anything is wrong with the house.
Princess Road West runs off New Walk, the promenade laid out by the Corporation of Leicester in 1785 to connect Welford Place with the old racecourse, now Victoria Park. Nearly a mile long, tree-lined, closed to traffic, and a conservation area since 1969. An Article 4 direction covers most of it, so the windows, brickwork and boundary walls can’t be altered on a whim. For a buyer who wants period architecture it’s the opposite: a guarantee the street will look much the same in twenty years.
The house itself is an end-of-terrace Georgian townhouse over four storeys, with a dark, confident frontage. Its owners took it back to brick and rebuilt it with the original proportions intact, adjusting the plan only where circulation needed it. The kitchen carries deVOL’s ‘Sebastian Cox’ design. The walled courtyard is painted in Little Greene’s ‘Jack Black’ and softened with mature ivy and clematis, an old water tank repurposed as a pond, the planting lit for evening. Behind a timber gate, off-street parking for two cars, close to unheard of on a city-centre conservation street. A blue plaque on the brickwork marks Edward Loseby, the clockmaker who lived here in 1877 and whose name is bound up with the clock tower in the Haymarket. The house has also appeared on George Clarke’s Old House, New Home.
None of that was reaching anyone.
The earlier campaign wasn’t inaccurate. It described the house the way almost every house gets described: bedroom count, distance to the station, rooms in the order you would meet them. The photographs recorded the rooms without recording the light. That produces a competent inventory of a commodity, and buyers who care about a back-to-brick Georgian restoration don’t respond to inventories.
So we treated it as design and heritage instead.
Pricing was set against what the house is rather than what the previous six months had implied about it. Long marketing periods create their own gravity, and a price that drifts downward invites buyers to wait rather than act. Targeting went wider than Leicester: London St Pancras is just over an hour from the mainline station, ten minutes’ walk away, and the audience for a restored Georgian townhouse of this quality is national.
The result was renewed momentum almost immediately. The house was picked up by the Leicester Mercury and featured by both Zoopla and Rightmove, and in September it was the second most-viewed home on Rightmove. A sale was agreed on day eight and completed five weeks later. We were informed by Zoopla that their post generated in excess of 2,000,000 views and was their most viewed piece of content throughout 2025.
The house didn’t change. The photographs, the language and the audience did, and that turned out to be the whole difference between six months and eight days.
There’s a broader point in this, and it applies to every architecturally influenced home in Leicester. Buildings like Princess Road West have a small potential audience by definition. Restoration this careful appeals to a narrow group of people, and if you market to everyone you reach none of them. The work is finding those buyers, and then describing the house in terms they recognise as true.
10 Princess Road West was and remains one of my most memorable sales across my estate agency career and is the epitome of the homes I am best known for selling.
Gianfranco Paparozzi is a Partner at Hortons, representing design-led homes across Leicester city.