The Story of the Country House - Chapter 9

A HISTORY OF PLACES & PEOPLE

Clive Aslet

The Story of the

COUNTRY HOUSE

The Story of CountrytheHouse

In 2019, Firle Place in Sussex, fragile and beautiful, was cleared for the filming of Emma. Even the central heating radiators were dismantled, to be reinstated when Firle returned to its usual, dream-like, seemingly unaltered state. The riding house has been converted to semi-permanent kitchens for TV’s The Great Celebrity Bake-Off. Country houses have, of necessity, become entrepreneurial, to meet the challenges and costs of the twenty-first century. Just as in 2001, ospreys returned to England, so owners who might have felt themselves to be an endangered species in the 1970s look to the future with optimism. A new generation is at the helm, often with young children. Taking on a country house is no longer regarded as totally odd.

Many country houses were demolished in the twentieth century and the members’ organisation Historic Houses calculates that the backlog of repairs on those that survive is enormous. Most, though, are in better fettle than could have been predicted half a century ago and some, by historical standards, are miracles of comfort. New owners with high expectations of finish and technology spend heavily on restoration.

Build quality can be as high as anything done in the past. An American architect wept when he visited one of the several chapels built by Craig Hamilton in the grounds of a country house. He could not believe it was possible to achieve such perfection of materials and craftsmanship in the sublunary world. He found it akin to a spiritual experience – as he called it, ‘transcendent’.

Such wonders cannot be achieved without large budgets and it was predicted that the financial winter of 2007–8 would blast the money tree. The gloom was unfounded. Spending continued, sometimes on a grand scale. The space needed by super-rich clients only increased. Home cinemas are the norm. Display space is needed for the collections of classic cars or contemporary art. Gyms and sauna suites can be extensive.

Fig. 47 The Laskett, Herefordshire. Roy Strong and his wife Julia Trevelyan-Oman bought a three-acre field from a farmer and embarked on the creation of the largest formal garden in England to be made in the second half of the twentieth century. The inspiration was Hidcote Manor in the Cotswolds, the formal gardens of the Tudor and Stuart period and Renaissance Italy. Sir Roy remembers that ‘for the first 15 years the only labour were two gardeners who came for one day once a fortnight’: it was a difficult time for countryhouse owners. © Clive

Nichols

In the 1970s, Sir Roy Strong, then director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and his wife, the theatre designer Julia Trevelyan-Oman, set out to create a garden in Herefordshire, reviving the formality of Baroque gardens: although packed with sculpture and follies, often with an autobiographical content, it was not large – even today it is no more than four and a half acres (fig. 47). It could not be more because the Strongs had little help: early photographs show Sir Roy behind a Rotavator. Such homeliness belongs to a more frugal age, as does the garden’s geometry. Inspired by estates such as Knepp Castle in Sussex and Alladale in Scotland, owners are increasingly beguiled by rewilding – an imprecise term which generally means allowing Nature to take care of itself within reason. They would rather look out onto a wild-flower meadow than a manicured lawn of no biodiversity interest. Indeed formality of all kinds is out of favour: as Martin Amis observes in his memoir Experience, ‘it used to be cool to be posh’ – a view incomprehensible to his children. In many country houses, baseball caps and contemporary art have taken the place of tweed suits and a mahogany dining table laden with silver.

Three houses sum up the state of play. The first is Ardfin on the Hebridean island of Jura, a spreading country house formed for a foreign client by Alireza Sagharchi of the architects Stanhope Gate. This is a remote location, but remoteness is not regarded as a disqualification so much as a charm, since it provides sixteen miles of shore, a view of Islay and privacy. What appears to be lawn is the first tee of an apparently natural links golf course, so discreetly designed that only the flags give the secret away. When the present owner acquired Ardfin in 2010, the lodge looked as bleak as only a neglected building in a distant Scottish location can do. It has now been more than trebled in size with new wings, seamlessly continuing the Scots Baronial idiom of the existing work, to become a comfortable and well-equipped country house with swimming pavilion, spa, shooting simulator, four-thousand-bottle wine cellar and cigar cave, garden structures and a small chapel in the grounds. Old steadings have been converted to provide a guest and entertainment complex, including a pro shop for golf. A courtyard has been glazed over, in case – perish the thought – it ever rains; giving off it are a ceilidh barn and a billiard room.

Inside the main house, Ardfin’s decoration is everything you could wish of a Scottish sporting lodge. Dark-stained pine panelling, Victorian floor tiles, chintz coverings to soft furniture, floral wallpaper and mahogany chests of drawers – all combine, with the architecture, to create a sense of place, complementing the views of the coast that can be seen through every window. So here is a virtually new house that is sympathetic to the existing architecture; which has been provided with an income stream (since the steadings and golf course will be let out when the owner and family are not in residence); and whose relationship with the environment around it is paramount. These are all themes of the twenty-first-century country house.

My second example is Harewell Hall, which has been newly built (the last touches were added during the lockdown of 2020) by the architect John Simpson for himself and his family in Hampshire. This is on a different scale from the sporting estate of Ardfin, being essentially a villa in a village location, next to the church. While Simpson has already been mentioned as a leading Classical architect, this building is thatched. The centre is a double-height hall, with a roof made of green oak and a minstrels’ gallery: the wood panelling provides an excellent acoustic for concerts. There is an imagined history to this house. Fictionally, the hall dates from the fifteenth century, when the village was owned by the nunnery of Wherwell Abbey; this building might have been used by visiting priests. Later the screens passage was rebuilt with columns; what is now the drawing room was added in the Georgian period. Beyond that is a swimming pool, in the form of a Baroque canal, with pergolas heaped with red and white roses to either side, laid out in false perspective. Like Ardfin, Harewell is sensitive to its setting; it is thatched because neighbours wanted the vernacular of the village to be continued. Rather than being dogmatic in style, the architect adapted to the conditions of the site – indeed, Simpson’s genius here was to achieve planning permission for a substantial home on a site that, in other hands, might well not have got it. This illustrates a key feature of the twenty-first-century country house: its form is often determined by the need to get a scheme past the planning officers. Simpson argued that at one point in the distant past a building of some consequence had stood here, a fragment of which survived in the form of an old cottage. The narrative embedded in the

architecture is also characteristic of today. We are seekers after identities and belonging. Houses are not only spaces but stories.

My third example is also from Hampshire. Little can Christopher Hussey have thought, when he published his classic The Picturesque in 1927, that it would bear such fruit as Downley House, a dramatically contemporary building. Hussey was inspired by his family’s seat Scotney Castle and the view out to a ruin of the old castle, which was kept as feature when its successor was built. Downley House also began with a ruin, if not quite such a romantic one. The site originally belonged to the local big house, now a school, whose water supply came from a reservoir at the top of the hill, that was pumped from the well at Downley. The ruin was that of the engineer’s house, reduced to little more than an ivy-covered wall. The architects Birds Portchmouth Russum kept this existing fragment and it became one of the generators of the design. Preserved, stripped of its ivy and planted with more beguiling climbing plants, it forms the protective wall of a courtyard garden.

The materials are Arts and Crafts, the relationship with the setting, in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, necessarily sympathetic. Silvery oak and sandstone from Lambs Quarry, in Sussex, have been used to clad much of the exterior of the house, contrasting with passages of white render. Some of the roof is covered with a blanket of sedum that provides a habitat for both birds and insects. The garage and service rooms have been set into a shoulder of hillside, making them invisible beneath the turf. But the form has wow factor. In the centre is a reprise of the medieval great hall, double height and used for many different purposes, among which eating has pride of place.

Medieval great halls tended to be dark and confined. By contrast, the hall at Downley House runs from one side of the house to the other, each end being formed of a window wall. The glass of these windows can be made to vanish, opening the hall to the garden on summer days. This is the ultimate extension of the desire to live closer to landscape and Nature that began in the Regency and was continued in the Edwardian period, with its verandahs, dining loggias and sleeping balconies. The result might be compared to the cross passage of a tithe barn, where one set of towering double doors faces another. Yet the shape is quite different,

having been suggested by the giant oak barrels known as foudres (the owners met while working in the wine business in New York). While the hall provides theatre, it also forms the central element of a tripartite plan: a shared common space that separates family rooms on the one side from guest rooms on the other. Privacy is maintained. Here then is another house with an embodied story, a house close to Nature, a warm-hearted house that nevertheless provides the owners with space for themselves; a house that continues the Picturesque tradition that is so important to the British way of seeing. It is an Arcadia for the family who live there. Arcadia elsewhere may be on the retreat: this is, environmentally, a fallen world. But the Arcadia of the country house remains an ideal within the grasp of the human imagination. As the outer world becomes darker, demand for the beautiful and contemplative spaces, the garden settings, the luxe, calme et volupté that can be found – or created – within the moat or the park wall is set to remain high.

The most significant development of late-twentieth-century planning was the live-in kitchen. This reflects an age that did not routinely expect to employ cooks. Hardly any large country house could have operated without a cook before the 1970s. Unmodernised kitchens, designed for bevies of staff, were too inconvenient and gloomy for an owner’s wife (it was likely to be the wife in that era) to use unaided. They might be some way from the dining room. But the 1980s saw the rise of specialist kitchen fitters, such as Smallbone, who made cabinets of a quality only seen in the drawing room, accompanied by a boom in upmarket food publishing, typified by the magazine A La Carte. Cooking might be complicated (no bish, bash, bosh as yet) but it could also be chic. In the 1990s, steel industrial-style cooking ranges became fashionable, giving the illusion that a home cook was equipped like a professional chef. To begin with, suppers served around a kitchen table were regarded as at best extremely informal, at worst inappropriate. These attitudes changed as people of all kinds spent more money on the design of their kitchens, making them more attractive to be in, as well as giving them more space. By the end

of the century, kitchens with big tables for family meals were combined with a variable number of satellite rooms, for homework, television or other screen watching, and possibly games like snooker or table tennis. Builders of new country houses who entertain on a big scale might need a second kitchen for parties, at which the food will be prepared by caterers. For ordinary purposes, the live-in kitchen is the place to chillax. With the rise of the kitchen went the death of the dining room. Most big country houses are still built with formal dining rooms; the number of people who will sit around the table at Christmas is one of the determinants of the size of the whole project. But dinner parties are not what they were. Who will polish the silver? With other forms of brown furniture, mahogany dining tables lost value in the salerooms: what was a status symbol to the yuppie generation of the 1980s is now a drug on the market. The rise of the live-in kitchen has been to the benefit of the new country house, compared to restorations, since it can be planned more conveniently, as integral to a project from the beginning. It can be difficult to accommodate such spaces in old and listed country houses, where state rooms may be too grand for kitchen use, as well as being difficult to open up. And so the family’s most intensively used rooms in the house, focused on the kitchen, are likely be found in the old servants’ wing. The priorities of yesteryear have been stood on their head. Today, the space everybody needs is a home office. As ever, the style journalist Nicholas Coleridge, lately retired CEO of the publishing group Condé Nast but still chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum among other things, is ahead of the game. In 2019 he fulfilled his ambition of building a folly at his home in Worcestershire. For architect he chose Quinlan Terry, who is not only the leading Classicist of his generation but has a special affinity with small, architecturally intense buildings. The inspiration in this case was the sixteenth-century summer house at Long Melford in Suffolk: a two-storey octagonal structure with corner buttresses. Brick was the obvious material to reflect Wolverton Hall (fig. 48). However, the folly is taller than the Long Melford building; the proportions have been improved and a viewing platform was provided at the top. There is an implied story to the folly. Although Wolverton was built in the eighteenth century, Mr Terry likes to imagine that historians

of the future think that the folly belonged to a house that predated the present one.

But this is a folly with a purpose. While the ground floor serves as a dining room, the building’s raison d’être is to be found on the first floor. Here is Mr Coleridge’s study, with bookcases filled with the works of Coleridges past and present, above which are plaster heads from an art school which found that life drawing was redundant. The client could not have foreseen that he and his family would spend the spring of 2020 locked down at Wolverton and unable to leave it for seven weeks because of coronavirus – or that he himself would spend ten days in intensive care. But the folly provided the ideal setting for the Zoom calls by which business as well as social life was suddenly being transacted.

As yet, it is impossible to predict the impact of Covid-19 on the economy, or indeed the sense of confidence that is so important if clients

Fig. 48 Folly built for Nicholas Coleridge at Wolverton House, Worcestershire, by Quinlan Terry. Terry, the leading Classicist of his generation, took inspiration from the Elizabethan summer house at Long Melford in Suffolk, which is similarly octagonal and built of brick. The room on the first floor contains Mr Coleridge’s home office, which proved its worth during the Covid pandemic of 2020, the year of completion. © Country Life Picture Library

are to commit to large building projects. Will they draw in their horns? If so, it could be that small, jewel-like pieces of architecture provide a more popular form of domestic self-expression than the ever-larger country houses we have seen in recent years.

And there is a wider significance. Not only is home-working bound to grow, it will be some time before we travel as much as we used to, as airlines struggle to recover their previous capacity. Life could become more local; there may well be a new focus on home. The city has been the loser from the pandemic, in that the buzz generated by people of all types and origins packed together (in the case of the London Tube) like sardines has gone – although – dare one believe? – the quieter pace, reduction in traffic and fall in pollution levels could make cities more attractive to be in. The countryside, by contrast, has gained. There it is easy to be socially distanced from other people, and gardens, during lockdown, were a great solace. Local networks are more resilient, because they have to be, and neighbours are more likely to know one another and help out.

The times are too uncertain to look very far into the future, but it is surely a safe bet, in these circumstances, that the country house will continue for many people to be an ideal. It has played many roles in the course of the story: medieval great hall, prodigy house, place of retirement, Baroque palace, Arcadian landscape, sublime fantasy, cottage orné, model of domesticity, Arts and Crafts utopia, inter-war pleasure dome, Neoclassical escape. What will its next avatar be? Covid stopped the world and caused a period of reflection, not least about the homes people were forced to spend so much more time in. They were already, perforce, thinking about the environment, because of climate change. As the world gets more crowded and Nature continues her retreat, luxury will be redefined. Silence will truly be golden. Seeing the diamond sparkle of stars against a black velvet sky will be precious to a generation whose night horizons usually have an orange sodium glow or halo of LED white. Hedgehogs, orchids, woods for the children to play in: these things will turn parents’ minds towards country houses.

Country houses are one of a kind: perhaps that will attract a world on the hunt for ‘authenticity’. More people will acquire craft skills as robots take other jobs. Their work will find its way into country houses

although – a dilemma that William Morris would have recognised – it will have to compete in price with innovations such as laser cutting and 3-D printing. Those technologies will radically reduce the cost of making ornament. Goodbye to the Machine Aesthetic of Le Corbusier, predicated upon early-twentieth-century means of production which meant that factory-made goods of simple outline cost less than the froufrou of previous eras. Computers do not recognise economies of scale; anything is possible. On the other hand, it could be that owners want a closer bond with nature – spaces that merge with the outdoors, as we have seen at Downley House. The Edwardians liked to sleep in the open air, on balconies outside their bedrooms; that could come back.

Locked down in London, I followed social media posts from country houses where life seemed to have been relatively little affected by the restrictions that had turned the capital into a ghost town. Admittedly they had returned to a state of social relations more akin to the age of Jane Austen than the twenty-first century: family members had to rely on each other for company, since they were not allowed out. But this was not such a hardship as elsewhere, given the amount of space in the house, the grounds to walk in, the vegetables from the garden, the larders and freezers heaped with emergency supplies and perhaps a well-stocked cellar. From the number of new buyers entering the country property market, it seems that I was not alone in making this observation. The self-created utopia of the country house has acquired a new point. Who knows? Perhaps a refuge from a harsh outside world will be needed at other times as the twenty-first century wears on. The country house has often served that need before. Until then, let us celebrate its long continuity, admire the architecture and enjoy.