The link between Henry Ford, pioneering American industrialist and powerful business magnate, and a rural Cotswold idyll may not be one that is immediately apparent.

I found it when I posted a picture of this puzzling facade in Northleach above to my subreddit. From there a fascinating story quickly emerged.

The relationship between Henry Ford and the Cotswolds began in 1920 when he and his wife Clara visited the region. They like so many do fell in love with its rolling hills and hidden valleys, and the beautiful villages that nestle within its landscape so perfectly.

Unlike many others he was not content with just some photographs, a embossed leather bookmark or branded umbrella as a keepsake.

No, Henry Ford’s ambition was a little grander than that.

He had made of point of visiting the region everytime he came to England and was fascinated with the buildings that seemed to blossom so organically from the verdant hills. By 1929 he had decided that he wanted one for himself. In a letter the brief was a laid out: Henry wanted a house in “an old style that has not had too many changes made to it that could be restored to its true type” and “possessing as many pretty local features as might be found.”

Herbert Morton, Ford’s English agent, set to work.

It was not to prove a straightforward task. Cottages that matched Henry’s demands were rarely on sale, and the owners of ones that did proved intractable when approached.

Then Morton got lucky. Driving through the village of Lower Chedworth he saw the cottage Henry was after, having “a nice doorway, mullions to the windows, and age mellowed drip-stones.” It was too late in the day to knock on the door, so Morton returned to Cheltenham, where he was staying that night.

Taking a morning constitutional the next day, Morton happened to glance in the window of a local estate agent and lo and behold staring back at him was a picture of the very cottage he had spied the evening before, offered for sale.

Such serendipity saw Morton purchase the 17th century Rose Cottage for £5000 under his own name (mention of Henry Ford would have surely inflated the price) and the 2 acres of land that went with it. However Henry was not fully satisfied and proceed to make some ‘improvements’ he felt truly encapsulated the Cotswold aesthetic, adding a bay window, a porch and a beehive oven, amongst other things.

He then proceeded to do one of the most American things and dismantled it brick by brick before shipping it, along with specialist builders from Gloucestershire to Dearborn in Michigan, to be rebuilt there.

It was not without controversy: locals were outraged when they learnt of the deception. The cottage had been occupied for 300 years, sold in good faith and now uprooted and relocated across the sea when there was a local housing shortage. A rather extreme version of gentrification: at least local pressure prevented Ford doing the same with Bibury’s famous Arlington Row.