It’s festival time again – the season for boaters, blazers, Pimm’s and picnics – when families congregate on the river bank in Henley for the event that’s a highlight of the annual calendar.

As ever. the main focus of interest for visitors unfamiliar with the ins and outs of water sports won’t be the rowers skimming along the water, grunting with the effort of maintaining the pace.

Much more likely, especially if the sun is shining, the topic of conversation for many bystanders will be the houses with gardens rolling down to the Thames and how much it might cost to buy one.

The average asking price for a house with five or more bedrooms in Henley on Tuesday this week was £1,794,231, ten per cent higher than on the eve of last year’s Henley Festival when the typical price was £1,625,291, according to the data on the website of home.co.uk.

Bucks Free Press:

Pictured is one of three houses in Wargrave - just over three miles upstream from Henley - currently for sale through Savills in Bell Street, Henley.

Cherry Eyot, priced at £2.625 million is a five-bedroom three-bathroom waterfront property. It’s in a private road in a garden of two acres with 650 ft frontage onto the River Loddon. The Loddon is a sort of country cousin of the Thames with which it runs parallel for a short stretch until the two rivers converge at Wargrave and Shiplake.

Cherry Eyot is raised on slender steel stilts to give the lucky people who own it a 270 degree view over the river from the balconies and main living area.

The property was originally built in 1965. Twenty years later, following a radical makeover by the acclaimed modernist architect John Pardey, it won the 2006 Grand Designs award for the best remodelled house in the UK.

Three of the five bedrooms have their own balconies and three are en suite – all the bathrooms have Burgbad fixtures and fittings. If you haven’t heard of this company before, in terms of prestige it’s highly rated.

The double height main living room at Cherry Eyot has a log burner and French doors onto a terrace. Under the centre of the house is a wine cellar.

The agents say the design was inspired by the so-called “case study houses” of the 1960s in California. John Pardey credited Richard Neutra, a leading modernist architect, as a major influence on his work.

Another house for sale in Wargrave of a type which carries a premium because they don’t often become available is Loddon Manor with 290ft frontage onto the River Loddon.

This modern manor house with five bedrooms and five bathrooms has a swimming pool and tennis court in the grounds of two acres.

Every south-facing room in the house including two of the bedrooms, the drawing room and the sitting room (which converts at the press of a button into a home cinema) has bi-fold doors either onto a veranda or balconies.

As you’d expect in a house of this quality, every bath in the house has a flatscreen TV mounted at the foot end and mirrors which light up automatically with the wave of a hand. The vaulted ceiling in one of south facing bedrooms is like a starlit sky when the lights are switched on regardless of what the weather’s doing outside should you wish to open the bi-fold doors onto the balcony to find out.

Loddon Manor is on the market for £3.195 million.

The third country house on Savills’ books in Wargrave is Creekside in Willow Lane on the edge of the village. The asking price is £3.25 million.

It has seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, five bedrooms and 345ft of river frontage onto the Thames. It is one of the largest private waterfronts in the area.

The house has an attached annexe for staff, boomerang kids or elderly relatives. The boat house on the water front has recently been restored and the grounds amount to just over one and a half acres. As with the other properties in the village waiting for new owners to be piped aboard, the views over the river and surrounding countryside are spellbinding.

Call the agent’s Henley office (01491 843000).