Ashcombe is a Georgian house on eleven acres just outside Knutsford, with 48 bedrooms, a walled kitchen garden that feeds the kitchen, and a manager who has been here nine years and publishes his mobile number. Everything below — the rooms, the prices, the day, the last inspection — is on this page so that you do not have to ring us to find it out.
Updated 8.15am, 22 August 2026
Not “please enquire about availability”. These are the real rooms, with their real numbers, their real size in square metres, and the real weekly fee that room costs. If a room goes, it comes off this page the same morning.
First floor · 21 m² · south-facing over the lawn
a week, inclusive. No top-up, ever.
Ground floor · 17 m² · courtyard side
a week, inclusive. Our lowest fee.
Ground floor · 19 m² · own door to the walled garden
a week, inclusive. Dementia care.
Why the three prices are different. They are different rooms. Room 22 is smaller and has a shower rather than a wet room, so it costs £55 a week less than Room 14. Room 4 is in the dementia household where the staffing ratio is higher, so it costs more. That is the entire explanation, and it is the same explanation we would give you on the phone.
What none of these prices do is move. The fee you are quoted is reviewed once a year on 1 April, capped at CPI plus two per cent, with ninety days' written notice. It does not rise because your mother's needs have increased, and there is no third-party top-up at this home — not for council-funded residents, not for anyone. The full fee table is here.
The person who is actually accountable
Care home turnover of registered managers in the North West runs at roughly one every twenty months. Marcus has run Ashcombe for nine years. He knows all 45 residents by name, he knows which of them takes sugar, and he knows which families ring on a Sunday because Sunday is the hard day.
When your relative moves in you get his mobile, not a switchboard. It is on the fridge in every household and it is written at the bottom of every letter we send you.
Inside the weekly fee
The average Cheshire care home invoice has between four and nine extras on it. Ours has none. Here is what is inside the number on this page.
Angela comes on a Wednesday, the podiatrist on the first Thursday of the month. Neither of them takes money from residents. Typically billed elsewhere at £18 and £35 a visit.
Whichever one it is, delivered to your chair, every morning. Fourteen residents take a paper. It costs the home about £2,900 a year and it is not on anybody's bill.
Tatton Park, the garden centre at Mere, the Christmas markets, and a fish and chip run to Parkgate every August. No trip fee, no “contribution towards transport”.
If your mother goes to Leighton or Wythenshawe, a carer she knows goes with her and stays. Some homes charge £22 an hour for this. We think that is an odd thing to charge for.
Kate is in on Mondays and Fridays and works with eleven residents on standing, transfers and falls. Referral is Marcus's decision and the GP's, not a sales decision.
Laundry, including dry cleaning. Toiletries. Continence products beyond the NHS allocation. Chiropractic pillows, bed rails, a second wardrobe. If it belongs to living here, it is in the fee.
Photographed on an ordinary Thursday
These were taken in March with residents in the building and nothing tidied away specially. Click any of them. If the real thing looks worse than the photograph when you visit, tell Marcus and he will take the photograph down.
Tuesday 12 August 2026, as it happened
Not a timetable. Nobody at Ashcombe is made to do anything at a particular hour, which is the point. This is simply what a Tuesday looked like.
Tom's team start the bread. Whatever else changes, the house smells of baking by half past seven, and it is the single most effective thing we have ever done for appetite. The average resident at Ashcombe gains four pounds in their first three months.
There is no getting-up round. Frank comes down at ten past seven for the cricket scores. Margaret has not seen a morning before half past ten in four years and that is entirely her business. Breakfast runs until eleven because that is when people want it.
Nine or ten people in the drawing room, the Telegraph crossword on the arm of the chair, and a long-running dispute between Frank and Peggy about whether looking up an answer is cheating. Staff sit down with them. Sitting down is written into our shift plan; it is not skiving.
On this Tuesday: braised beef with horseradish mash, plaice with parsley butter, or a leek and Cheshire cheese tart. Twenty-one of that day's vegetables came out of the walled garden thirty yards away. Anyone may bring a visitor to lunch, free, without telling us in advance.
Jack, who has looked after these eleven acres for six years, takes whoever wants to come. Four residents have their own raised bed. In August it is beans, and the beans go to the kitchen, and the kitchen puts them on the board with the grower's name next to them.
A lighter supper at half five, then television, or the piano, or bed. Four staff are awake all night for the main house and two for the Garden Household — awake, not sleeping-in. If someone is up at three, the kitchen is open and someone will sit with them.
154 reviews of this home · 9.8 out of 10
Published in full on carehome.co.uk, including the four-star ones. We have never asked for a review to be taken down and we would not know how to.
We looked at nine homes. Eight of them wouldn't tell us the weekly fee without “arranging a conversation with the manager”. Ashcombe had it on the website, on a page, next to the room number. That told us more about how they'd treat my mother than any tour could. Fourteen months on, the fee is exactly what they said it would be and she has put on nine pounds.
Catherine Ollerton
Daughter · Ashcombe House · June 2026
My father was a difficult man and became a much more difficult one after the stroke. I had prepared myself for phone calls asking us to find somewhere else. Instead Marcus rang to say they'd worked out he was calmer if he was given a job, so he now folds the tea towels every afternoon and thinks he is on the payroll. He died here in February, in his own room, with two carers he liked holding his hands. I cannot ask for more than that.
Hugh Mainwaring
Son · Ashcombe House · March 2026
The care is genuinely excellent and the food is better than most restaurants round here. Four stars and not five because the laundry lost two of Mum's cardigans in her first six weeks and it took three goes to get anyone to take it seriously. To be fair, when Marcus found out he replaced them himself and changed how the labelling works. But I shouldn't have had to escalate it to him.
Denise Cartwright
Daughter · Ashcombe House · November 2025
How a first visit actually goes
The best time to judge a care home is half past twelve on a weekday, because that is when it is busiest and hardest to stage. You are welcome to turn up then without telling us.
There is no signing-in book and no reception hatch. Whoever is nearest the door will find Marcus, and if he is not in the building the deputy, Priya, will show you round instead.
Including the corridors we would rather you didn't, the sluice, and the Garden Household. Open any door except a resident's. Ask any member of staff how long they have worked here.
Two courses, at a table with residents, free, and you can bring whoever you want. This is the whole sales pitch. If the food is not what we said it was, you will know inside ten minutes.
No follow-up call unless you ask for one. No “just checking in” email on day three. Choosing a care home takes families an average of five weeks and being chased does not help.
Or simply arrive between 8am and 8pm, any day of the year.
Asked on nearly every Ashcombe call
No. Between 8am and 8pm, any day including Christmas Day, you can walk in. There is no appointment system, no signing-in book, and no notice period. Booking simply means Marcus keeps the half hour free and the kitchen lays an extra place for lunch.
We would gently suggest coming at half past twelve on a weekday for a first look. Lunchtime is the hardest hour to fake.
Everything except your relative’s own personal spending and their own telephone contract if they want a private line. That means all care, all food and drink, all laundry including dry cleaning, hairdressing, chiropody, physiotherapy where clinically indicated, all outings and the minibus, hospital escorts, newspapers, toiletries and continence products.
There is no third-party top-up at Ashcombe and there never has been. Eleven of our 45 residents are funded by Cheshire East at the council rate and pay nothing further; that costs the group about £190 a week each and we take it out of the self-funded fee rather than out of the family.
No. This is the promise we get argued with about most, so to be precise: the fee attached to the room does not change because the level of need changes. If your mother arrives walking and two years later needs two carers and a hoist, the invoice is the same invoice.
The only change is one annual review on 1 April, capped at CPI plus two per cent, with ninety days’ written notice. In 2026 it was 4.1 per cent. In 2021 we did not raise fees at all.
The exception is a move between types of care — residential to nursing, for instance — because that is a different service in a different home. Ashcombe does not provide nursing care, so that move would be to Highfield, and we would tell you the figure before anything happened.
Then your relative stays. We have never asked anyone to leave Ashcombe because their capital fell below the threshold, and it is written into the contract you sign.
What happens in practice is that at roughly £30,000 of remaining capital we sit down with you, do the local authority financial assessment together, and apply for Cheshire East funding — and if the council rate is lower than our fee, which it will be, we absorb the difference. That is what the eleven council-funded placements above actually are.
Furniture: yes, and we would rather she did. Her bed, her chair, her chest of drawers, her pictures, her rug. Maintenance will hang anything on the wall for you and we do not charge for it. The only things we cannot take are freestanding heaters and anything that fails a PAT test, which we do on site, free, on move-in day.
The dog: at Ashcombe, yes, subject to Marcus meeting it. Three residents have cats, one has a very old spaniel, and there is a house rabbit in the Garden Household called Alan. Highfield cannot take pets in rooms because of the nursing layout.
Ashcombe was inspected in October 2025 and rated Outstanding overall, with Outstanding for caring and responsive and Good for safe, effective and well-led. The full report is on the CQC website under provider 1-1884073 and we will hand you a printed copy at the door if you would rather read it there.
The two things the inspector asked us to improve were the speed of medication audit sign-off and the clarity of some care-plan reviews in the Garden Household. Both were done by January and Marcus will show you the evidence if you ask, including the bits that made us look slow.
Come and stand in it. Stay for lunch afterwards, at a table with the people who already live here. Nobody will follow you round with a brochure and nobody will ring you afterwards unless you ask us to.
Three different people land on this page. Tell us which one you are.
I'm looking for a homeVisit and stay for lunch I just want the priceEvery fee, on one page I'm a discharge teamSame-week admissions line