How Chequers has changed — and stayed the same — in a century, as pictured in Country Life

Chequers is to be the future country home of British Prime Ministers. Such is the generous and patriotic resolve of its present owners. Sir Arthur and Lady Lee came to this most delightful Buckinghamshire seat some ten years ago, and at once began conservative reparations. The principle on which they were broadly projected and admirably executed was to give back to the house, within and without, the full character and flavour of the times when it originated, while modern habits of life should find scope and gratification.

Mainly built under Elizabeth, it had, as we know from family documents, escaped with scarce any alteration until a hundred years ago much money was spent in obliterating its history and its beauty under a pervading coat of mock medieval frippery, so pleasing to its perpetrators that the unhappy place was described in 1823 as 'lately fitted up in the Gothic style with exquisite taste.'What this exquisite taste was like future ages may still learn through the medium of photography. Such presentment will have documentary value for a future history of the rise and fall of Art, but the relegation of the stuff itself to the rubbish heap is not likely ever to be regretted. It is well to preserve examples of every phase of architecture and decoration. There is always the best of a bad lot.

Nor must we forget that man is habitually unappreciative and destructive of what the next preceding generation has done, although later on it may again be valued. The Strawberry Hill manner may, therefore, have future devotees, but they should have left for them complete creations in that taste and not palimpsests set over a truer style.For the Gothic of 1820 was not a true style. That surely may be stated, not as a passing whim, but as a permanent principle. It imitated in paltry and superficial fashion the forms of an age of which it ignored the spirit, the purpose and the methods. It was third-rate theatricalism; not well considered creation or copying.So Chequers is well without it, for it has been replaced, as the illustrations show, by a careful return to sixteenth and seventeenth century models wherever the original fabric called for such owing to wreckage and defacement. Wholehearted has been the attention and affection which Sir Arthur and Lady Lee have bestowed on every department and detail that make up the full entity of this complex work of art.