By Anna Cooban, CNN
The Cotswolds, England (CNN) — In a churchyard, about 100 miles west of London, the rain drives at a 45-degree slant, pounding the stone footpath so hard it bounces back as white fuzz that hovers just below the ankle.
St Mary’s Church is the 14th-century nucleus of Painswick, a town in the Cotswolds, a region in southwest England famed for its hills and honey-colored cottages. It is a chunk of that Jane Austen-esque, close-to-cloyingly twee England that has long attracted tourists and homebuyers — sometimes despite the weather.
Lately, though, local real estate agents told CNN, increasing numbers of Americans are calling it home.
According to those agents, some want their children to attend prestigious British schools and universities; others seek a bucolic, slower pace of life. Some feel pushed to leave the United States by the threat of wildfires or gun violence, or by political changes they oppose. Most are incredibly wealthy.
“I have this funny feeling,” Frances Shultz, a 60-something North Carolinian who bought a Cotswolds cottage in 2023, told CNN, “of being sort of dropped in the middle of a TV series, a very wholesome, sweet BBC one.”
It’s an ambition that Schultz, a journalist and author writing about homes and interior design, had nursed for years. She described living vicariously through the pages of Country Life, a British property magazine teeming with glossy photos of manor houses and their multi-acres.
A divorce in 2022 provided the necessary push: Schultz soon bought a four-bed cottage a stone’s throw from St Mary’s. “It was love at first sight,” she said of her new home.
Katy Campbell, Schultz’s buying agent — a type of realtor finding properties and negotiating their prices on behalf of buyers — told CNN that she’s seen a 20% increase in the number of American clients over the past year.
Historically, a big chunk of these clients were already living in the UK — usually London — when they came to buy their countryside boltholes. Now, Campbell said she’s fielding more calls from Americans based in the United States, and has grown familiar with their tastes.
They purchase homes — usually their second, third or fourth — for between £1 million ($1.3 million) and “tens of millions,” she said. They want cozy (think Kate Winslet’s cottage in “The Holiday,” just much, much bigger) and they want discretion. “They can wander in villages and people don’t really turn and stare,” she added. “So you can be fairly incognito in the Cotswolds.”
Naturally, Campbell won’t name names, but did say that some clients are “from films.”
The Cotswolds span several of England’s “shires” and are sprinkled with British celebrities. David Beckham regularly posts vignettes of life on his Oxfordshire estate to Instagram, including making honey and digging for vegetables. Kate Moss has been photographed tramping around the same shire in muddy boots since the early 2000s.
American celebrities have also drawn attention to the area. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres helped put the area on international radars when she moved there from California in 2024. Vice President JD Vance spent part of his family vacation in the Cotswolds this summer.
Schultz spends her summers in Painswick and the rest of the year in New York City. She once owned a cottage in the Hamptons — the see-and-be-seen vacation spot for the city’s elite that has drawn comparisons to the London-Cotswolds axis — but