Most of the grand, stately homes ‘lost’ in the 20th century were victims of war, taxes or fire — and occasionally all three. Warter Priory, however, bucked the trend(s).

Situated in the bucolic Yorkshire Wolds, the property that Country Life arrived to photograph in about 1905 was not actually a priory, but a vastly extended 16th-century house.

'Warter' was said to be an Anglo-Saxon word for 'felons' or 'gallows tree', or, simply, a reference to the abundance of water in the area; the 'Priory' part was a nod to a lost Augustine Priory once situated about a mile away.

In 1878, Josslyn Pennington, 5th Lord Muncaster, sold the priory to Charles Henry Wilson of Wilson's Steam Ship Company.

At the time, Wilson’s leviathan enterprise was responsible for the UK’s largest, and therefore highly profitable, trans-Atlantic cargo fleet. The acquisition was more personal than business-minded: Wilson's family had been tenants on the land for centuries and his grandfather was born on the estate in 1746, later moving to Hull's docks to work as a lighterman. The victorious Charles returned, two generations on, as Lord of the Manor. He wasted no time.

Wilson and his wife, the imposing Florence Wellesley, eldest daughter of a nephew of the Duke of Wellington, got to work greatly extending and enhancing the house. A vast baronial hall clad in impressive, carved wood panels sat behind a new porte-cochere and clock tower — ensuring visitors were awestruck as soon as they arrived. Impressive staircases in oak and carved marble were installed. By the end of the works, Warters boasted about 100 rooms, 30 of which were bedrooms for visiting guests.

Wilson, who was also the Liberal MP for Kingston-upon-Hull, the East Riding’s Justice of the Peace, and Deputy Lieutenant, was a philanthropist who busied himself with many charitable deeds in the area. However, one of these, was the closing of the village pub — the fabulously-named Creeping Kate Inn — on account of his strong belief in abstinence. This belief saw him introduce a bill in Parliament for the closure of all public houses on Sundays.

Wilson died in 1907 leaving his widow to entertain alone. She hosted regular shoots, one of which was attended by Sir Winston Churchill, and reportedly 'terrorised' her estate workers, frequently conducting spot inspections on their cottages.

By 1927, Florence's health was failing and the now deeply-fashionable mansion was put up for sale. Against all the odds, including the fact that she demanded being laid to rest on the estate, Warters sold to the Hon George Vestey, who had made his own fortune in the meat trade.

Unusually for the time, Vestey had the financial means to keep the house in the Victorian manner to which it had become accustomed. To this end, he retained a vast staff to keep his vast mansion, its gardens and estate running like clockwork.

When he died, in 1968, Warters' valuable land was sold to the Marquess and Marchioness of Normanby. The house was surplus to their requirement.

Four years later, a local newspaper reported that it was to be bulldozed and the remains dumped in its own ornamental lake. Initially branded 'fatuous', on May 5, 1972, Country Life wrote about a 4½-hour fire sale of fixtures and fittings: businessman L. W. Hill of Chesterfield bought the Great Hall's oak panelling, the marble staircase, an oak staircase, a marble chimneypiece and a minstrel’s gallery for a £1,515 (about £18,460). Warter Priory was flattened shortly afterwards and, as the newspaper had said would happen, used to fill in the lake.

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When T. E. Lawrence first set eyes on Clouds Hill, Dorset, in 1923, he realised that it would make a good place to hide. Although its name suggests that it sits high up, open to the sky, this humble whitewashed brick cottage is concealed from casual sight. Set in a hollow in the south Dorset heathland and enclosed by pine trees and rhododendron bushes, it possesses a powerful atmosphere of secrecy (Fig 1). Then about to turn 35, Lawrence was living under the assumed name of T. E. Shaw as a private in the Tank Corps, based at Bovington Camp, a mile to the south.

He had sought this obscure anonymity to escape his international celebrity as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (Fig 3), the result of his starring role in the Arab revolt of 1916–18 that had helped the Allied Powers defeat the Ottoman Empire. He hoped also to find peace to complete Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the epic account of his desert campaigns that was to secure his lasting fame.

Lawrence had made his first bid for anonymity in July 1922 by enlisting in the Royal Air Force as an airman under the name John Ross, only to be discharged a year later when his identity was leaked to the press. Arriving at Bovington in March of 1923, he found his initial feelings of pessimism were ‘very much like the wintry heath, of bog and withered plants and stripped trees’ that surrounded the camp.

Yet, as he recognised, this was also the Egdon Heath of Thomas Hardy’s novels. As soon as he arrived, he sought an introduction to Hardy, who lived in Dorchester, 15 miles away, an easy ride on Lawrence’s motorcycle.

Shortly after this, he was shown Clouds Hill, which was being restored from almost total ruin by one of his fellow soldiers. Seeking a refuge from what he called the ‘cat-calling carnality’ of life in barracks — he returned to the RAF in 1925 — Lawrence offered to complete the work at his own expense and rent the cottage. Built in 1808 on the Frampton family’s Moreton estate, perhaps for a forester, the house has only four rooms, two on each floor.

Initially, Lawrence fitted out only the upper floor, for use primarily as a writing room. It was only a daytime retreat as, when not on leave, he had to sleep in camp, where he also ate, and he installed neither running water nor electricity. Lawrence was content with this make-do life because he assumed that he would not need the cottage for long, but, in 1929, he decided to buy it, to form a permanent base in his peripatetic service career.

After Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle accident on the road from Bovington in 1935, the novelist E. M. Forster, who knew the cottage well, wrote that to think of Clouds Hill ‘as T. E.’s home is to get the wrong idea of it. It was rather his pied-à terre, the place where his feet touched the earth for a moment and found rest’. Nonetheless, in his later years there, Lawrence dedicated considerable effort and money to making the cottage suitable for the more settled life he envisaged after retirement from the RAF.

This was not such a departure as Forster’s comment may imply: throughout his life, Lawrence took a great deal of care about his domestic settings. Clouds Hill was the last of four small houses Lawrence helped create in the course of his life and it drew on memories of its predecessors.

Lawrence was the second of five brothers brought up in a large house in Polstead Road, north Oxford. Recognising that their clever, unusual second son needed independence and a place to study, in 1908 his parents had a two-room bungalow built for him in the garden. He draped the walls with blue cloth to block out external noise: ‘it was the most silent place I have ever been in,’ remembered a friend. Lawrence lived there when an undergraduate at Jesus College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with a young Welshman, Vyvyan Richards, who shared his enthusiasm for fine books and printing.

In 1910, Richards became a master at Bancroft’s School in Woodford, Essex, near the southern edge of Epping Forest, where he had the use of a wooden hut on Pole Hill, a steep slope set in the forest with a fine view of the London skyline. Intending to install a printing press there, he and Lawrence made plans for replacing it with a house of medieval type that would incorporate beams Lawrence had rescued from a demolished 14th-century hall in Oxford.

These romantic intentions foundered when Lawrence joined a team of British Museum archaeologists excavating at Carchemish, the Hittite citadel on what is now Turkey’s border with Syria. There, he was charged with overseeing the erection of a permanent house on site. Its scale was revealed when the foundations were excavated and conserved in 2013–14: the one-storey building comprised 18 rooms built around a courtyard, with living accommodation, spaces to display findings and a photographic darkroom. The director of the dig, Leonard Woolley, later famous as the excavator of Ur, recalled how the sitting room (Fig 5) was furnished with ‘some good rugs, the best of which Lawrence had bought. He had had made in Aleppo two armchairs of black wood and white leather of whose design he was very proud; he had brought out from home a piece of Morris tapestry to hang on the wall, he had some nice Kutachia pots, and of course books’.

This comfortable life was swept away by the First World War. Although it brought him international celebrity, the Arabian campaign left Lawrence desolate and exhausted and he was greatly cheered when Richards called him back to their former plans. Having gone back to London, Lawrence worked intensively on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as Richards prepared his hut to be the home of the press that would print it. In 1919, with money inherited from his father, Lawrence bought land at Pole Hill, intending to settle there. The original hut, described by him as ‘my house’, was destroyed by fire in 1921, but, with the help of his pupils, Richards rebuilt it with an open veranda, which he called ‘the cloister’, and an outdoor plunge pool.

In another hut on the land, Lawrence stored a pair of elaborately carved teak doors he had bought in Jeddah (Fig 6), perhaps with the intention of incorporating them in the larger house and garden on Pole Hill that he and Richards planned, for which they consulted the architect Herbert Baker. However, these dreams were undermined by Lawrence’s decision that he would take no profits from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and then his enlistment in the RAF.

In 1929, Lawrence sold his land at Pole Hill to the Epping Forest authorities to ensure that it would not be built over, but also to raise funds for improvements to Clouds Hill, which by then he intended would be his permanent home. The Forest authorities moved the hut to their headquarters in Loughton, where — remarkably — it survives.

When Forster paid the first of several visits to Clouds Hill, in June 1924, he was enchanted by its informality and the hospitality that Lawrence gave to favoured soldiers from Bovington camp. The artist Gilbert Spencer, who that year was invited by Lawrence to make a painting of the heathland landscape that is still in the cottage (Fig 7), remembered him in the main upstairs room (Fig 2) correcting proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and listening to a gramophone record of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, as ‘a Company Sergeant Major sat with the poems of Laurence Binyon on his lap’. Lawrence had fitted out the room in his characteristic taste — bare wood and brick, with undyed leather curtains in place of doors, recalling the medieval inspiration of the proposed house at Pole Hill. Forster thought it very ‘brownish’.

Lawrence liked to exaggerate the cottage’s discomfort, writing in 1934 that it ‘is as ugly as my sins, bleak, angular, small, unstable: very like its creator’. In fact, fellow soldiers were impressed by his expensive motorcycle and gramophone and even the food on offer — in the absence of a kitchen, eaten directly out of tins, which made Forster ill — was ameliorated by Fortnum & Mason hampers.

Lawrence loved long, hot baths and, in 1933, he finally arranged for the house to have running water and a boiler. He installed a bathroom in one of the two ground-floor rooms, which was lined with sheet cork of high quality. The other room was fitted out with a fireplace, bookshelves, a large daybed on which he reclined to read (Fig 8) and an armchair of his own design. Its broad arms, designed to support books, give it an Art Deco look.

Lawrence fitted out the two upper rooms like a ship’s cabin, with a bunk bed and porthole window, taken from an old, broken-up battleship. Strikingly, he lined the walls with aluminium foil (Fig 4). Although this had a practical purpose — the room was used for storing food, so needed to be dry and cool — it also evokes the world of interwar glamour associated with an unexpected acquaintance of Lawrence, Stephen Tennant, the epitome of the 1920s ‘bright young things’. In 1927, this fey young aesthete was photographed by Cecil Beaton in his bedroom in London, which he had lined with silver foil. Tennant visited Clouds Hill in the 1930s and it seems likely that Lawrence knew the image, which might, therefore, have inspired his own silver room.

On the far side of the road from the cottage, Lawrence constructed a pool, partly to provide water to douse the heathland fires that occasionally threatened the cottage and partly for use as a plunge bath (as at Pole Hill). To keep fallen leaves out, he constructed a glass canopy over it, large enough to incorporate the two doors from Jeddah that had been in storage in Essex.

A few weeks before Lawrence’s death, Richards stayed at Clouds Hill. Lawrence intended to install a small hand-press in the building over the pool, taking advantage of the fact that its ‘atmosphere would always be damp and good for printing’. He hoped to start in the autumn of 1935 by printing his frank account of life in the RAF ranks, The Mint, and ‘some good but obscure poet’.

Lawrence’s plans for the cottage at the time of his death looked back, therefore, to the life he and Richards had first planned before the war. According to Richards, the intentions for their house in Epping Forest had included a pair of box beds inscribed ‘Meum’ and ‘Tuum’. These sleeping arrangements were replicated at Clouds Hill, in the form described by Lawrence, with ‘two sleeping bags, zip-fastened and labelled in embroidery MEUM and TUUM. When night falls the cottager takes up his bag, unfolds it on the piece of floor he momently prefers, and sleeps’.

Clouds Hill was inherited by Lawrence’s youngest brother, the archaeologist Arnold Lawrence, who in 1937, having removed the books and many of the works of art, donated the cottage to the National Trust. When James Lees-Milne visited in 1945, he was repelled by its setting ‘in the middle of Bovington Heath, which is a blasted waste of desolation, churned feet-deep in mud by a thousand army tanks’ and thought the cottage ‘a pathetic little shoddy place. The visitors have stolen all they could lay their hands on’.

It is a tribute to the careful restoration of the interiors embarked on by the National Trust at the beginning of this century, helped by a photographic survey made after Lawrence’s death, that Clouds Hill is now unrecognisable from that description. Instead, it evokes with almost unnerving immediacy the way its creator’s complex personality was embodied in his places of refuge.

Michael Hall is the author of ‘A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust’ (Bloomsbury, £25)

Visit the National Trust website to find out more about Clouds Hill.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Throughout history, Muntham Court — situated on the South Downs, four miles north of the seaside enclave of Worthing — was a place souls retired to to indulge in their hobbies.

Unusually for a large country estate, Muntham was not passed down through generations of the same family. Instead, different characters would arrive and then depart, leaving a trail of clues as to who they were when they had occupied the land. Neighbouring Cissbury Ring, Britain's second-largest Iron Age fortification, hints at the first occupants.

In the early 1950s, archaeologists working at Muntham uncovered evidence of a sizeable Iron Age settlement and a Roman-era 'village'. Fragments of even-earlier Bronze Age weapons were also found.

Throughout the years, the land was bought and sold by the Munthams (who are presumed to have built the first house on the site), the Cornwallises, the Apsleys, the Shelleys, the Gorings, the Crowes, the Middletons and the Montagues, until, in 18th century, it was purchased by William Frankland.

Frankland, a descendant of Oliver Cromwell and the rumoured inspiration for Jane Austen’s Henry Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, was, it is fair to say, eccentric.

Born in India to the then-governor of Bengal, he amassed a vast fortune in the East India Company. By the age of 40, he determined to venture west, taking three years to travel to England, sometimes (for safety, apparently) disguised as a Turkish messenger, via Baghdad, Jerusalem, Babylon, and Palmyra.

At Muntham Court, the confirmed bachelor dedicated his latter years to scientific research and inventing. He extended the property, filling rooms with all manner of devices he invented. There were whirring textile machines, printing presses, spinning devices and electrical apparatus. And if that wasn’t enough noise, he also fashioned machines to play musical instruments and filled what space was left with timepieces, which presumably chimed on the hour.

When Frankland died in 1805, his vast collection was immediately auctioned off.

Muntham was then sold, and then sold again, until, in 1850, Harriet Thynne (nee Baring), the Dowager Countess of Bath, moved in, after ceding control of Longleat (of stately home safari fame) to her son.

The Dowager Countess recognised the estate's potential, but was far from impressed by its appearance, famously declaring that: 'The upper classes do not live in red brick!' She employed local architect Henry Woodyer who refaced the house with local flint and added Jacobean-style Dutch gables, and, later, a Bath stone extension.

The Dowager Countess was also determined to overhaul the gardens.

Yew trees — long associated with sacred ground — were abundant so she had them fashioned into walls, walks and clipped into symmetrical shapes. She also planted a Judas tree, a species native to southern Europe and East Asia that produces vivid rosy-pink flowers every spring.

Country Life’s photographs of Muntham Court date to 1907, 15 years after the Dowager Countess had died. By then, it was in the possession of Lady Ulrica Thynne, her widowed daughter-in-law. She, in turn, passed the property to her son, Colonel Ulric Oliver Thynne.

Thynne was a much-decorated veteran of the Boer and First World Wars and, by 1922, the standard bearer of His Majesty’s Royal Bodyguard of Gentlemen-at-Arms. He was also, as was common among the gentry of the time, a keen marksman and trophy-hunter. His Muntham contained more than 50 taxidermied animals, including a hippopotamus, which lived in the Billiards Room.

Thynne and his stuffed menagerie stayed at the house until the outbreak of the Second World War when, like so many other large properties, it was requisitioned by the War Office. Unusually, after hostilities ended, he returned, living there until his death in 1957. He was buried in the grounds and the estate was put up for sale.

No attempt was made to sell the house as a home; instead, it was advertised as a possible school, hotel, convalescent home or residential development. Sadly, no one's appetite was whetted.

The house and majority of its land was eventually purchased by Worthing Council who at the time had little regard for antiquity. In 1961, Muntham Court and its gardens were flattened. It's now the site of Worthing Crematorium — where souls still go to retire.

The Judas Tree — reportedly the largest known specimen in Europe — still blossoms every year, but the hippo’s whereabouts are unknown.

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In the beautiful gardens at Plas Brondanw, one feature has special significance. Terminating an avenue of chestnuts is a flaming urn that, as the carved dedication below states, was ‘raised on the ashes of their home by Clough and Amabel Williams-Ellis’ to mark the end of the rebuilding campaign on December 10, 1953, and commemorate the seven local masons and craftsmen to whom restoration was due.

Exactly two years earlier, the couple had awoken to the smell of smoke. Clough found the ground-floor library ablaze and his beloved terrier, Pennant, lying dead on the threshold. The telephone cable was already burnt through and Clough was lucky to escape after the floor gave way beneath him. A messenger ran to the village summoning five fire brigades, but a winter gale fanned the flames until little more than the 3ft thick walls survived. Press reports described the usually dapper architect of Portmeirion, now 68 years old, his face, feet and one hand bandaged, ‘wearing his wife’s spectacles and borrowed clothes,’ resolute that: ‘My house will rise again.’

Williams-Ellis had inherited the Brondanw estate in Gwynedd in 1908, aged 25. As a child, his mother had taught him to appreciate the simple Welsh cottages she liked to sketch and the combined dynastic responsibility and romantic setting of the Williams manor house in the shadow of Snowdon immediately inflamed his antiquarian tendencies. It was some 50 years since Williams-Ellis’s grandfather had left the house on succeeding to Glasfryn in Caernarfonshire. Tenants from the local slate quarries had moved in and, by the early 1900s, seven families inhabited the building.

This period of familial absence neatly coincided with most of the Victorian era, the architectural output of which Williams-Ellis roundly despised. Having, as he put it in his autobiography, ‘never been deflowered by restoration or improvement’, Brondanw was ripe for sympathetic conservation and every spare penny he earnt from clients was channelled towards its gradual resurrection.

Built into the slope of the hillside, the oldest part is the two-storey late-Tudor entrance range (Fig 2). This survived the 1951 fire and maintains its large farmhouse hearth under an impressively wide, but shallow arch of slate. In the 17th century, a grander four-storey cross-wing had been added overlooking the tidal estuary of the Afon Glaslyn, an area subsequently reclaimed by William Madocks for farmland and the building of Porthmadog on the coast. A slate plaque set into the south-west end of Plas Brondanw records the initial and date ‘W. 1660’.

Despite their divergent scale, the two building phases sit harmoniously together within the wider landscape, accessed from an 18th-century forecourt and linked by what Christopher Hussey, in a 1931 Country Life article, called the ‘plentiful slabby stone, blue and purple and brown, that inspired most of [Williams-Ellis’s] operations here’.

The architect’s first building projects at the house were a sturdy gate lodge with fairytale-castle qualities and a rather French-looking orangery that set oeil-de-boeuf win- dows in the local rough stone, both of 1912–14. This external work was partly due to the ongoing tenancies; Williams-Ellis’s own space in the house was initially limited to the lower ground-floor brewhouse vacated by the hasty departure of a notorious salmon poacher. As the second son, inheriting the second estate, Williams-Ellis also lacked money for grand gestures.

Evidence that he did speculate on the possibilities for more ambitious changes comes from a Capriccio for Rebuilding Plas Brondanw, now in the RIBA drawings collection. Here, the vernacular original has largely disappeared in a perspective view that features a Classical pediment over the garden front and polygonal bay windows rising through three floors of the gable end. The 15th-century range has been raised by two storeys and become an infill with a new gabled tower behind it linked to a second cross wing. Certain elements foreshadow nearby Portmeirion, perhaps his most famous creation (Country Life, January 7), but there is also something of the Cambridge colleges Williams-Ellis knew from his brief spell as an undergraduate. The 1913 date is significant, for this was the year he met his future wife, Amabel Strachey.

Keen to demonstrate his suitability as a potential husband, Williams-Ellis had the bravado to exhibit his dream at the Royal Academy, picturing himself next to a veiled woman in the foreground, plans spread out before them. As it turned out, the house was already perfect for his bride-to-be. Amabel later confessed that: ‘It was a good thing that I’d promised to marry Clough before I saw Brondanw, otherwise I could never have been sure it hadn’t been for love of Brondanw, rather than any fancy I had for him, that had made me say yes.’ Immediately after the couple’s Surrey wedding in July 1915, they boarded a train to their Welsh home. As a wedding present from his fellow officers in the Welsh Guards, Williams-Ellis requested a folly. Baffled, they obliged (Fig 1).

After the war, garden improvements continued as the house returned to a single dwelling. Williams-Ellis’s growing architectural practice, the demands of three children and his wife’s work as an author and journalist meant, however, that the family lived mostly in the capital, settling at Romney’s House, Hampstead in 1930 and letting Plas Brondanw to friends. In 1937, Williams-Ellis solved the problem of a bulging west wall in characteristically stylish fashion, adding a belvedere tower that acts as a buttress as well as simultaneously enhancing views from, and of, the house (Fig 5). At its base, arches on three sides span the lower terrace, creating exactly that sensation of a little tunnel Williams-Ellis particularly enjoyed.

When war came again, the family left London for the safety of rural Wales. It was the first time they had permanently inhabited Plas Brondanw and, although they shared it with a string of evacuees, they came to know it more profoundly and, in Clough’s case, to see its faults. In some ways then, the fire presented an opportunity to improve and modernise the interior.

The difficulties were considerable in an era of building licences and continued rationing, but few architects were better trained in using salvage than Williams-Ellis, who kept a store of historic parts at Portmeirion. To reinstate the burnt-out floors, he opted for fire-resistant concrete covered with oak parquet. Unable to source the required steel joists, he scoured redundant slate quarries on the Brondanw estate and repurposed old tramway rails to do the job. Roof timbers and slates came from an old school nearby; 18th-century doors and fire surrounds arrived from a London dealer. The biggest change to the interior was on the attic floor, which became a self-contained flat accessed from the steeply rising ground at the rear via a playful route across a stone arched bridge, roof terrace and loggia.

On the ground and first floors, Williams-Ellis skilfully manipulated sightlines, borrowing light and creating vistas into the landscape that lend a feeling of grandeur to what is really a compact and intimate interior. With barely three bedrooms and three main reception rooms, the connecting spaces are all the more important. In the entrance hall, two short staircases re-use four different designs of timber balusters, a suitably quirky introduction to a house where decorative features from across the eras mix with ease.

One stair descends to the ancient brewhouse, the other leads up to a room in the buttress tower, where windows on three sides frame shifting views of the near garden and far mountains. The neighbouring library (Fig 6) was Williams-Ellis’s studio until his death in 1978. He worked here into his eighties, standing at his drawing board, surrounded by books and a cosy jumble of sofas, armchairs and sidetables. A Classical fireplace speaks to his love of the Georgian style, as do the four fluted pilasters on the gable wall that add status to an otherwise ordinary sash window. Such is the depth of the window reveal that Williams-Ellis used it to conceal extra bookshelves.

Today, Plas Brondanw is open to the public, showcasing the work of the family’s eldest daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, artist and founder of Portmeirion Pottery. The library curtains are made from her mid-century textile designs and displays of her ceramics and works on paper rotate alongside exhibitions by contemporary artists. Although it is now a gallery, Brondanw retains the informality of a lived-in space, thanks to a combination of curatorial sensitivity and the strength of Williams-Ellis’s architectural personality. His unique stamp is everywhere. In the Tudor kitchen that became the dining room and eventually Amabel’s bedroom, it is most visible in the stepped alcove that juxtaposes a large window with elegant fanlight against the room’s low, beamed ceiling. Set into the green terrazzo floor is a grey marble circle that began life as a tabletop made for Penrhyn Castle.

At the heart of the redesigned home are the staircase hall and upper landing, defined by curves and round-headed arches. Together, they provide a generous, clean space that seems to sit effortlessly within the historic structure. Key to this more open arrangement was the replacement of the original dark oak stair treads with slate, the lower steps arcing round to meet the worn slate of the surviving hall floor (Fig 8).

Reversing the stairs allowed for construction of a new ground-floor cloakroom with an access tunnel that is vintage Williams-Ellis, teasing out the architectural pleasure from a small and functional space. The short passageway has a barrel ceiling, its floor is laid with chequerboard black and white marble, borrowed light coming from a round-headed peep hole in the wall. At the top of the stairs (Fig 7), the bespoke iron balustrade employs a repeat pattern of interlocking ovals with rounded tops and bottoms, the sections separated by uprights that mimic the pair of fluted oak pilasters framing the entrance to the landing. Painted in turquoise and gold, the ironwork matches the iron gates (Fig 3) and garden features visible outside.

The first-floor drawing room opens off another strip of chequerboard marble that runs across the landing to its door, an architectural reminiscence, perhaps, of the picture gallery at Romney’s House Williams-Ellis laid with black and white squares for his studio. As a decorative device, it cleverly establishes a hierarchy of space, marking out the public drawing room from the private bedrooms, dressing room and bathroom. Post-fire, a new Venetian window gave the drawing room greater external emphasis. That it was also a bit of Classical pomp is clear from the flaming plaster urns over the two side windows, the whole internal window nook outlined by fluted oak pilasters with gilded Corinthian capitals (Fig 4).

The use of salvage elsewhere on the first floor was more utilitarian. In the dressing room, surplus doors became a high shelf with a hanging rail fitted to the underside for clothes storage. Structural decoration in the main bedroom was minimal. When one realises that the angle of the window splay on the north-east wall allowed Williams-Ellis to view the peak of Snowdon from his bed it becomes clear that nothing else was really necessary.

For its response to and ongoing conversation with the landscape, Plas Brondanw is a special and beautiful place. The spirit of Williams-Ellis and his love for this corner of north Wales is as alive here as it is in nearby Portmeirion, more subtle certainly, but every bit as delightful.

With special thanks to Rachel Hunt.

Visit the Plas Brondanw to find out more about visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

You might be surprised by the number of tour guides operating in the Polish new town of Nowa Huta, a name which means New Steelworks. However, it makes sense when you realise that 15 million people visit the baroque beauty of nearby Krakow annually and there will always be a few, more adventurous tourists who want to learn stories about Poland’s immediate past.

In addition, Nowa Huta is elegantly designed. From Lenin Square (now called Ronald Reagan Central Square), five treelined boulevards emanate. As you walk them, the standard story which the guides will tell you is that Joseph Stalin himself deliberately located the Lenin Steelworks and the town which serviced it, here, due to the particular bourgeois, anti-Soviet tendencies of Krakow.

In truth the Cursed Soldiers, as the native resistance to the Red Army occupying Poland were known, were more active in rural areas near the Belorussian border. The real reason is more practical. While iron ore was transported all the way from Ukraine, Nowa Huta was near the Upper Silesian coal fields. Even if its symmetrical network of avenues and cross streets are strikingly similar to the plan of Magnitogorsk, an industrial city on the east side of the Ural Mountains, local architects were given enough scope to give the early grander phase of building an architecture with flourishes recognisable to those who have visited Krakow. The tiered façades of the main streets and the ornamental mouldings on the door frames of the mansion blocks make reference to the baroque language of the older city, albeit in concrete and with an extra level of muscularity.

Construction of the pumped-up neo-Classical architectural, ornamental parks and symmetrical plan, which the more intrepid tourist discovers, began in 1949 with Soviet technical assistance while production at the plant began in 1954. The steelworks became one of the largest employers in southern Poland, producing a broad range of steel products used in domestic construction and export. The plant was an expression of socialist might, and shaped Nowa Huta’s urban and social identity, with housing, cultural centres and worker amenities built around it. The Lenin Statue by Marian Konieczny, one of the truly great social realist sculptures, on the Avenue of Roses was removed in 1989 and currently stands in a wild west theme park in Sweden.

Were it not for the singular intervention of a cleric known in his early life in Krakow as Karol Józef Wojtyła, but later when he moved to Rome as Pope John Paull II, Nowa Huta would still be a fascinating and in parts, to outsiders, attractive place; the lines of trees and linear plantings down wide boulevards are particularly striking. Nowa Huta is unique outside Russia as a major expression of Stalin’s proclivity for neo-Classical planning as well as architecture. The reality of Soviet economics kicked in later. The stripped back Modernism found to the north of Nowa Huta tells a story of decline. However, Wojtyła’s influence has created another fascinating layer to the city.

Perhaps understandably no churches were built by the Marxist Leninists in the original iteration of Nowa Huta. However, as Archbishop, Wojtyła began celebrating mass in Nowa Huta from 1959, outdoors, before a wooden cross. It says a lot about Polish Soviet relations that even in this ideal socialist city, there were protests that the authorities were forced to contain rather than suppress. Stalin described the process of making Poland communist, as like ‘putting a saddle on a cow’, with the Catholic Church constantly giving the Poles the strength to buck Soviet imperial dominance. Wojtyła supported the widespread desire for a church to be built in the new town, and, in the face of opposition from the authorities, was finally able to complete one in 1977 against a backdrop of food riots throughout Poland.

Shaped a little like Noah’s Ark and nicknamed as such, The Church of the Mother of God, the Queen of Poland, as it is officially known, owes a huge debt to Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut Chapel; a primitivist assemblage of curved geometries that speaks to an architecture that both pre-dates and supersedes the linear rational lines of Nova Huta’s plan. Wojtyła gave the local church a stone brought back from the moon by American astronauts that had been given to him: modernity overstepping rationalist Modernism to place man closer to the cosmos.

People’s spiritual and social needs must be part of any urban plan: even if it comes late. The Church of Our Lady of Częstochowa was begun in 1982 close to the site where Wojtyła’s masses took place. It was built from brick, the same material used for the later, post-Stalin apartment blocks, although it is not plastered as they are. The design is ingenious, a series of pitched roofs, receding from the front elevation and growing in height, its façades are lattice windows, creating a series of tree-like crowns on the exterior and a shaded bower within. Nowa Huta may struggle in today’s economic climate, due to the enduring dominance of the steel work as employer, (it is now owned by Arcelor Mittal) but as a place it gets ever more fascinating.

Christopher Hussey’s unusually effusive 1935 Country Life article on the achingly romantic Valewood Farm speaks of childlike wonder.

He describes his first vision of the property: 'Its wavy russet roof is bosomed deep in profuse vegetation, so that one’s first impression is of straying into a Hans Christian Andersen fairy story. One expects curious creatures of doubtful ancestry to peer imploringly or menacingly out of the encircling boscage.'

Valewood Farmhouse was, as the name would suggest, an old farm and associated buildings perched on the edge of the Blackdown Hills on the Surrey/West Sussex borders. Commanding glorious views across the South Downs, the romantic, mid-14th century timber-framed property had over the years been dressed with sandstone and half-hung with rich, red tiles characteristic of this corner of the Weald.

During the majority of the 19th century, it was home to the Mangles family. Captain James Mangles, who had spent a number of years in the Bengal Civil Service and was a keen horticulturalist, returned to this sleepy corner of the countryside after many years abroad, armed with copious samples of rhododendrons. He set about hybridising the plants and establishing them on his lands at Valewood.

At their heart, the Mangles were creatives. They were strongly connected to artists and artisans, counting their neighbours Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) among their closest friends. Their daughter, Alice, married artist William George Daffarn, with his contemporary Helen Allingham painting numerous watercolours of the picturesque property. Another great artisan of the time, and great friend of the family, was Gertrude Jekyll, Country Life’s formidable gardens expert.

An 1866 edition of the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society of London mentions H.A. Mangles winning a unanimous merit for his Rhodeodenron 'Gertrude Jekyll', named in honour of the great garden designer. Jekyll’s influence on the gardens here would continue into the 20th century.

Fast forward to the 1920s, and Alice Daffarn (nee Mangles) had inherited Valewood from her parents. Not wanting to relinquish the idyllic property, but also wanting to remain in London for the foreseeable future, Daffarn set about finding a suitable tenant. She first let it out to Allingham, who had a short tenure, dying at the property in 1926. What followed next was, well, a case of, as the late Queen said, recollections may vary.

After completing his First World War service, and returning to the UK, the Modernist architect Oliver Hill had been searching for respite from his busy London life in the form of a fashionable weekend retreat.

According to a 1928 article in Country Life by fellow architect R. Randal Phillips, after years of fruitless sorties trying to find the right property, Hill had seen….’…through a break in the trees, the chimney and roof of an old house, and, after a brief examination, realised its possibilities.’ It had, according to Randal Phillips, lain abandoned for over eight years, and the garden was described as ‘a swamp’.

This description greatly upset Daffarn, who in all likelihood was already acquainted with Hill and had previously agreed to let it to him. She wrote to the magazine to protest against the description of her family home being in a 'ruinous state' before Hill had 'saved' it. She did, despite this slur on the family property, let him stay. The results of his work in the gardens were spectacular.

Right in the centre of what would have been the old farmyard, Hill constructed a 30ft long, oval bathing pool. It was filled from a natural spring via the mouth of a magnificent jade pottery frog.

Always concerned with the aesthetic, Hill ensured the water was always the perfect shade of azure by occasionally scattering in a (don’t try this at home, kids) few, highly toxic, copper sulphate grains. An adjacent old grain store and byre were transformed into a changing room/sun trap, and cooling loggia respectively. By 1935, the whole scheme was surrounded by a menagerie of beasts, some real, some less so.

In 1928, Hill had been assisted by Jekyll with a naturalistic planting scheme — one of her last — for the gardens. She had even provided plants from her nursery at Munstead Woods. But by the 1935 article, Hill had reportedly gone his own way, largely departing from her scheme, although vast, soft blue swathes of delphiniums, anchusas and Salvia virgata, softened by pink sidalcea and grey foliage — classic Jekyll varigated height and colour combinations — waved joyously by the side of the swimming pool in summer.

Slightly above the pool, a more conventional terrace was laid out. Despite the heavy clay soil, a rose garden tried its best on the lower terraces, although it was noted that between the congested soil and Hill’s beloved peacocks, who were rather overly fond of ingesting the blooms, this garden was not the property’s most prolific.

Passing through the barn, away from the pool, led to a straight, brick path which transported you to a short ha-ha overlooking what today would be called a wildflower meadow. In spring, it bobbed with a profusion of bouncy, white cow parsley.

During his long tenancy at Valewood, Hill’s architectural creativity flourished. During his time at the farm, he designed, among others, the British Art Deco icons the Midland Hotel in Morecombe and the entire Art Deco enclave in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex. The clean, dramatic lines of his work were a far cry from the romanticism and 'organised chaos' of his weekend retreat.

Hill’s tenancy came to an abrupt end at the start of 1948 following the death of Daffarn. So did his gardens at Valewood. By the dawn of the 21st century, while the aged farmhouse spread its roots deeper into the land, very little remained of Hill’s idyllic weekend retreat gardens. The pool was filled in. The jade ceramic frog and porcelain fawns were (hopefully) rehomed.

But there was one happy ending to the fairytale. One echo of the past does continue to flourish in rude health around the lanes in the area. Vast drifts of Capt Mangles’ invasive rhododendrons burst into flower every spring in this corner of the country.

If you wish to see his work in a more contained setting, Leonardslee Gardens, roughly 10 miles to the east of Valewood, inherited the majority of his collection, which puts on a magnificent technicolour display every April-May.

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When Henry VIII died at Whitehall Palace in the early hours of January 28, 1547, the Crown passed to his nine-year-old son, Edward VI, and power to a council of individuals named in his will. Only three days later, the leading figures in the new administration took advantage of their position to reward themselves. Their acknowledged leader, Edward Seymour, uncle to the new King, assumed the titles of Lord Protector of the Realm and Duke of Somerset, as the royal servant, John Dudley, soon to be appointed Lord Great Chamberlain, became Earl of Warwick.

Dudley had been constable of Warwick Castle since 1532, which was then in royal ownership. His choice of this particular title probably reflects both that connection and the exceptional prestige attached to it. As described last week, the earldom was established in 1089, but was linked back yet further through the fictional hero Guy of Warwick to the deep, imagined past. Dudley had earlier adopted his namesake castle of Dudley, Warwickshire, as his seat. Now, he claimed a family connection with the Beauchamps, previous Earls of Warwick, and adopted their heraldic devices of a bear and ragged staff. He also sought to obtain full ownership of the castle and town.

To facilitate this acquisition, he gave a deliberately misleading account of the state of the castle. It was, he claimed, ‘not able to lodge a good baron with his train, for all the one side of the said castle with also the dungeon tower is clearly ruinated and down to the ground’. As constable, however, he had presided over extensive works to the buildings on behalf of the King. These included the reuse in 1538 of a ‘well-tiled’ roof, 60ft long, taken from the recently suppressed Blackfriars in the town, to cover a new kitchen, as well as repairs to the cliff beneath the principal domestic range that ran along the River Avon.

A more disinterested account of the castle in the 1540s is offered by the antiquarian John Leland. It was, he wrote, ‘magnificent and strong… [and] set upon an high rock of stone’ (Fig 4). He also refers to ‘the principal lodgings’ where ‘the King doth much cost in making foundations in the rocks to sustain that side of the castle’. Independent accounts record the delivery of 500 carts of stone to stabilise the cliff. It’s conventional to think of castles as passing out of fashion in the Tudor period, but this investment in Warwick underlines the prestige that some still enjoyed.

Dudley subsequently fell out with the Duke of Somerset and, in turn, became the principal power in the realm. In 1551, he assumed the title of Duke of Northumberland and seems to have set in motion an unsuccessful attempt to assume control of the palatine of Durham and its castle. At the same time, however, he also secured possession of Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, the sister foundation to Warwick. At Kenilworth, he built a massive new stable, its timber framing evoking the emblem of the ragged staff, modelled on its lost 15th-century predecessor at Warwick.

Dudley’s career was famously cut short by his catastrophic attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the English throne after the death of Edward VI in July 1553. He was executed for his efforts, but his two eldest sons, Ambrose and Robert Dudley, were restored by Queen Mary and, as close political associates, rose to great power in Elizabeth I’s Court. Ambrose, as the elder, acquired the title and castle of Warwick. His more celebrated brother, the Earl of Leicester, a suitor for the Queen’s hand, adopted Kenilworth as his seat, but clearly aspired to his brother’s inheritance, founding the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.

Both brothers hosted Elizabeth I on grand and carefully choreographed visits to their respective castles, Ambrose at Warwick in 1566 and again in 1572. On the latter occasion, the Queen occupied the main medieval domestic range and watched country dancing from her chamber window in the castle courtyard. Her rooms also overlooked the river, a specially created garden and the park, where a mock battle was staged for her benefit.

Ambrose died in 1590, after his brother, and was buried beside him in the Lady Chapel of St Mary’s, Warwick, the mausoleum of the Beauchamp Earls. All his titles became extinct and a depressing survey of the castle taken the same year suggests that the buildings had not been well maintained. One curiosity is mention of two large stone windows that appeared ready to collapse. These may have been ‘compass’ windows — bay windows on complex plans — that projected out over the river below. Similar windows were added by his brother to Kenilworth Castle.

One local landowner, Sir Fulke Greville, saw the ruins as a possible source of building materials to repair his own house of Beauchamp’s Court, Alcester. The castle had, he asserted in 1601, ‘been a common gaol these ten or twelve years; the walls down in many places hard to the ground; the roof open to all weathers… so as in very short time there will be nothing left but a name of Warwick’. Happily, his request for the stone was rejected and, in 1604, his son and namesake, a soldier, writer and courtier, managed to acquire the castle and completely repaired it.

The motive was probably family piety; the younger Fulke inherited the Barony of Brooke and claimed through it connections with the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick. It may have been in preparation for these works that a detailed plan of the castle was drawn up by the architect John Smythson. It shows the main domestic ranges in much their present form running along the edge of the cliff and a central hall with service buildings, screened by a wall, at one end and withdrawing apartments at the other.

The antiquary Sir William Dugdale reported that the repairs cost Lord Brooke more than £20,000 and judged the castle ‘a place not only of great strength, but extraordinary delight, with most pleasant garden walks such as this part of England can scarcely parallel’. Greville was murdered by a manservant in 1628 and buried in the chapter house of St Mary’s Church, Warwick.

Fulke’s adopted heir was a cousin, Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, a religious and political radical. From January 1642, as the Civil War brewed, he modernised the defences of Warwick Castle, reworking the motte as an artillery fortification. It has been suggested that the iron hooks on the exterior of the gatehouse (Fig 3) are fixings for woolsacks to protect the masonry from shot.

The castle withstood a short Royalist siege in August 1642 and, after the Royalist disaster at Edgehill on October 23, Caesar’s and Guy’s Towers were pressed into use as prisons. Thereafter, Warwick became an important Parliamentarian stronghold. In January 1645, its garrison included 302 soldiers with their officers, 15 mounted scouts, six drummers, two gunners, seven grooms, a surgeon and a vicar. As such, it miraculously survived the Civil War substantially intact, one of a handful of major English castles to do so.

Lord Brooke was killed at the siege of Lichfield on March 2, 1643, shot from the spire of the cathedral. The title passed in sequence to two of his young sons, the eldest, another Robert, 4th Lord Brooke, was one of the peers sent to the Hague to invite Charles II to return. Following the Restoration in 1660, the garrison was disbanded and the castle handed back to him. Soon afterwards, he began improvements to it and, in 1667, a grand Classical stable and coachhouse were built outside the walls, since demolished. Two years later, a laundry was begun beside the main gate and a master carpenter and builder from Warwick, Roger Hurlbut, was contracted to wainscot the Great Hall.

This was the start of the complete renovation of the withdrawing apartments in the most fashionable style. Brooke’s brother, William, was sent to see the new interiors designed by Sir Roger Pratt for Sir Ralph Bankes at Kingston Lacy, Dorset, and these clearly informed the redecoration of the full suite of withdrawing chambers now known as the Red Drawing Room (Fig 5), the Cedar Drawing Room (Fig 2), the Green Drawing Room (Fig 7), the State Bedroom and Boudoir. These rooms were created within the existing shell of the range, which was internally partitioned to accommodate a corridor, now known as the Armory Passage. Final payment for these rooms was made by Robert’s brother, Fulke Greville, 5th Lord Brooke, who succeeded to the title in 1677.

Born after his father’s death in 1642, Fulke lived until 1710 and, on November 4, 1695, loyally welcomed William III to Warwick Castle. Pitch and tar illuminations devised by Nicholas Paris were burnt on Guy’s Tower for the occasion and 100 gallons of punch distributed in an iron cauldron, the supposed porringer of Guy of Warwick. Guy’s relics, proudly presented by the porter, amused the traveller Celia Fiennes, when she visited the castle in 1697. She admired the house and gardens as well as the ‘vast prospect’ from the castle motte. In 1768, this mount was further ornamented with two towers constructed by a local builder Job Collins.

The development of the castle in the 18th century involved a litany of professionals ornamenting and improving the buildings at the direction of successive Grevilles, who, from 1759, were also Earls of Warwick. A common theme of the work is a consciousness of history and the use of Gothic detailing, as in the ceiling of the castle chapel that was being installed in 1748 (Fig 6). Equally thoughtful externally is the battlemented dining room added by Timothy Lightoler in the 1760s in front of the great hall.

Over the same period, the level of the courtyard was raised and the grounds of the castle more clearly defined. In the process, the town was gradually pushed away. By the end of the century, it’s no exaggeration to say that the castle was a nationally admired monument. As a reflection of this, elements from it were widely copied in other buildings such as, in the same county, Edgehill Tower of 1746–67 by Sanderson Miller, or Charleville Castle, Co Offaly in Ireland, from 1800.

A financial crisis in the first decade of the 19th century brought sustained investment in the castle to a close, but improvements were made to receive Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1858. Then, in 1861, the architect Anthony Salvin was employed to begin further changes to the building. He also directed repairs after a devastating fire gutted the private apartments in the medieval service area and hall (Fig 1) in 1871. Salvin’s renewed domestic rooms are an unusually fine survival of their period, their interiors decorated in strikingly different styles. In 1894, on the birthday of the celebrated socialite and beauty, Daisy, Countess of Warwick, the castle was supplied with electric light, still then a novelty.

During the mid 20th century, the costs and complexity of maintaining the castle steadily increased and, in 1978, David Greville — from 1984, 8th Earl of Warwick — reluctantly sold the castle and 100 acres of surrounding landscape to Madame Tussauds for £1.25 million. Major repairs followed the purchase and the interiors began to be presented in what was then a completely novel fashion with lifelike mannequins.

The approach proved hugely successful and, today, there are two displays of this kind, one on the medieval theme of Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ and the other on an Edwardian weekend house party. Henry VIII also appears with his wives (Fig 8). There are numerous additional exhibitions and displays, as well as a busy round of live events, all of which take advantage of the castle setting. For the 750,000 visitors it now receives each year, Warwick Castle — since 2007 run as part of the Merlin Entertainments group — is a theatre, where fantasy and history meet. The extraordinary thing is that in very different ways, through the figure of Guy of Warwick, it always has been.

Visit the Warwick Castle website to find out more about visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Highclere became world-famous in the 2000s as the impossibly grand Hampshire house used as the location for the filming of Downton Abbey. Yet it was a place celebrated long before ITV's film crews turned up to create the classic period drama, not just for its architecture, but also for the treasures that lie within.

The most famous of these are its Egyptian antiquities, collected by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, excavator of Tutankhamun’s tomb; and its Napoleonic memorabilia, including the Emperor’s chair and desk, personal effects sold from Longwood House on St Helena after his death in 1821.

Today,, though, the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon stand in the Smoking Room at Highclere, an interior redecorated and rehung in the 1990s, in front of a different antique: a table that incorporates decorative panels representing birds and fruits made of ‘hard stone’ or pietra dura.

Making decorative use of stones such as lapis lazuli, onyx, cornelian and sardonyx enjoyed particular popularity in the late 16th century and Ferdinando I de’Medici established a workshop — the Opificio delle Pietre Dure — in Florence in 1588 that became a centre for its subsequent production.

The panels here are thought to date to the 17th century, but were subsequently united in this table, probably in the 19th century. In several cases, the stones actually project from the surface of the panel, giving it real depth.

‘We both love Italy and think the craftsmanship of this table is exceptional,’ says Lord Carnarvon.

‘I love the idea of Nature set into marble, frozen and made eternal. John Keats explores this in his celebrated poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, published in 1819; this table is our urn.’

A version of this feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Unlike its namesake, Papillon Hall managed to live a lot longer than a brief spell. But, still, it perished far too quickly.

On May 4, 1912, Country Life published a supplement focused on the latest works of Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944). One of the prolific architect’s works under the microscope was his modernisation of Papillon Hall in Lubenham, just outside Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

In the opening years of the 20th century, Lutyens had been called in by Captain Frank Ashton Bellville, heir to the Robinson’s Barley Water and Keen’s mustard fortunes, to greatly extend his octagonal, 17th century, semi-fortified home.

The heart of Bellville’s home, built — and lived in, for some time — by the French architect David Papillon, came with one small, but seemingly potent problem.

According to local legend, Papillon, the person, not the house, had a Spanish mistress who he kept prisoner in the attic after she fell from his favour. The poor woman died in mysterious circumstances sometime around 1715. When Bellville acquired the house, he also took possession of her 'cursed' brocade shoes. Locked behind a grille, legend (and legal documents) had it that if the shoes ever left the house, misfortune would befall its owner.

The original hall was retained at the centre of Lutyens' designs, and an extra storey added to it. There were four new wings, built in the shape of a butterfly, which contained a dining room, billiard room, kitchen and servants' hall. To the south was a sunken pond, dotted with water lilies; to the east, the flower gardens were replanted inside the wings, in the cottage garden style of Lutyen’s great friend, Gertrude Jekyll.

For the duration of the works, the brocade shoes were kept at Bellville’s solicitor's offices.

Reports show that work progressed slowly; contractors pulled out at the last minute and there were numerous accidents and one death. The skeleton of a long-dead woman, presumably Papillon’s mistress, was discovered in a bricked up cavity in the roof. Then, in August 1905, Captain Bellville was badly injured when he was thrown from his jaunting car (a small horse buggy). Against all the odds, he recovered.

However, the shoes were on the move again — this time, to a museum. Soon after, George Rathbone, an electrical engineer, died in a car car crash. He was in Bellville’s car being driven by Bellville’s chauffeur. Sarah Clark, a servant, was accused by later acquitted of infanticide after a dead baby was found in her room. Lastly, Bellville was flung from his polo pony. (Amazingly, he recovered, again, which somewhat disproves the lucky shoes theory.)

Bellville died in 1937, at the age of 68, and Papillon Hall passed to his son, Rupert.

Rupert was described in contemporary news reports as a sportsman, airman and one-time amateur bull fighter. He also fought alongside General Francisco Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, at the moment his father died, he was in Spanish prison.

Rupert reportedly fell into the enemy's hands because he presumed Santander had been taken by the Spanish nationalists, so flew himself and the head of González Byass to the latter's headquarters, to pick up a few cases of celebratory sherry. Upon landing, he discovered a) his error and b) the opposition.

The sherry-seeking Franco fighter was released following a series of heated negotiations and, when he arrived home, set about painting every gate on the estate in the dictator's colours. Then, in 1938, he put it all up for sale. However, it failed to actually sell.

During the Second World War, Papillon Hall hosted the 319th Glider Battalion and the 82nd Airborne Division of the American Army, who, naturally, were not overly worried about building and garden conservation and Lutyens' unique creation fell into a state of seemingly-terminal disrepair.

After the War, the decision was taken to demolish it, but not before Rupert’s wife 'saved' the remaining slipper (Rupert had taken one with him to Spain which explains quite a lot). Today, only small parts of the garden remain; the shoes are on display at the Harborough Museum.

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On June 24, 1348, in the course of a tournament at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, Edward III famously instituted a fellowship of 25 knights under his personal leadership. The Order of the Garter, as it was known, was established at a moment of martial triumph in England. One of the founder members of this new order was Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who personified the confidence and belligerence of the moment. ‘The Devil Warwick’, as his enemies called him, had fought side by side with Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and otherwise enjoyed a formidable reputation as a soldier. He was also a great builder and, as the modern visitor encounters it outwardly, Warwick Castle is substantially his creation.

William the Conqueror first founded the castle in 1068 within the defences of a fortified settlement or burgh. The burgh, created in 914 by Æthelflæd of Mercia, occupied a hill top that had been naturally cut back as a cliff on one side by the River Avon. William constructed the castle along the cliff top (Fig 1), from where it commanded a river crossing. According to the Domesday survey of 1086, four houses were demolished to make space for it. William’s castle seems to have taken the conventional form of an artificial mound — termed a motte — and an associated enclosure or bailey. The motte, albeit heavily reworked since the 11th century, still survives and it’s assumed that the bailey followed roughly the line of the later walls. These earthworks were presumably fortified in timber.

Warwick Castle was subsequently granted to a Norman, Henry de Beaumont. The exact date of this grant is uncertain, but it was through Henry’s close connection with the Conqueror’s son and heir, William Rufus, that he was able to constitute a vast patchwork of estates extending across the Midlands, South Wales and Normandy. It helped, too, that, in 1088, he became Earl of Warwick, with exceptional powers within his titular county. The Earl seems to have played a crucial role in securing the succession of Henry I to the throne in 1100 and, in 1118, towards the end of his life, became a monk. At that time he seems to have divided his estates, passing those in England to his eldest son, Roger.

By contemporary assessment, Earl Roger was a failure. Henry I almost immediately compelled him to yield up a very considerable portion of his Warwickshire estates to a royal favourite, Geoffrey de Clinton, who established a rival castle about five miles away at Kenilworth in the same county. The stories of these two great castles remained inextricably linked until the latter was demolished in 1649. During the Civil Wars fought after Henry I’s death in 1135, the Earl was forced to hand over Warwick to a royal garrison. He is described as dying of shock in 1153 after hearing the news that his wife, Gundreda, had tricked Warwick’s garrison into surrendering the castle to the supporters of the future Henry II.

Through the 12th and 13th centuries, the architectural development of Warwick Castle is a near blank. For a building of such importance, this is surprising. Documentary sources reveal the existence of a chapel and, in 1191, a certain Ralph the Mason inspected minor repairs, implying the existence of stone buildings or fortifications. These presumably replaced the original timber structures of the 11th century. It is also asserted by the 15th-century historian of Warwick, John Rous, that, when supporters of Simon de Montfort sallied out of Kenilworth and captured the castle in 1264, they had ‘beaten down the walls from tower to tower’ to render the fortifications useless to Henry III. He goes on to say that the walls of Warwick Castle were substituted by hedges.

In 1268, soon after this event, the Earldom of Warwick was inherited by William Beauchamp. Neither William nor his son, Guy, who succeeded as 10th Earl in 1298, are known to have improved Warwick Castle, although the latter did use it for the brief imprisonment of Edward II’s notorious royal favourite, Piers Gaveston, in 1312. Gaveston, who dubbed the Earl ‘the black dog of Arden’, was famously led from the castle to nearby Blacklow Hill — significantly the property of another inveterate enemy, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster — and executed. Guy died in 1315 and the castle passed to his son, another Thomas. Perhaps the state of the building — hedged and without new buildings — inspired him to transform it so completely.

Thomas was just over a year old when he inherited his father’s estates and was a minor throughout the turbulent events and military humiliations of Edward II’s reign. He secured his estates in 1329, shortly before Edward III — his near contemporary — dramatically seized control of the realm from his mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, in 1330. His building work at Warwick is not documented, which makes it complicated to date, but its character cannot be properly understood without reference to the King’s enthusiasms and concurrent activities at Windsor.

The Order of the Garter was directly inspired by the example of the Knights of the Round Table, whose fabled exploits enjoyed European popularity in the late Middle Ages. Edward III had previously built a ‘Round Table’ in the Upper Ward at Windsor in 1344 and attended tournaments splendidly dressed in Arthurian persona. Rooting reality in legend was intoxicating and, in Warwick, Thomas had his own chivalric hero to promote. The legend of Guy of Warwick, notionally set in the period of the Danish invasions, became popular in the early 13th century and exists in multiple versions.

According to it, Guy won the hand of Felice, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, by performing daring feats of arms across Europe. Following his marriage and the conception of a child, Reinbrun, however — and, according to some versions, when staring into the heavens from the top of the tallest castle tower — he suddenly realised the vanity of fighting for a woman; he ought to have been fighting for Christ. Leaving the tearful Felice, he set off once again on his adventures until miraculously summoned back to England to vanquish the Danish champion Colbrond. After this duel, he became a hermit outside Warwick and, on his deathbed, sent for the faithful Felice, who immediately followed him to the grave.

Thomas Beauchamp’s enthusiasm for this legend first found expression in the 1330s. Not only did he name two of his sons Guy and Reinbrun, but he was almost certainly the creator of an 8ft-high sculpture of the dead hero carved in the living rock at so-called Guy’s Cliffe (Fig 6), the supposed site of his hermitage close to Blacklow Hill (Country Life, July 21, 2010). Beauchamp’s will in 1369 also makes mention of ‘the coat of mail sometime belonging to that famous Guy of Warwick’, which was bequeathed to his son and namesake. Guy’s legend was assuming reality.

At Warwick Castle, meanwhile, Beauchamp built an entire suite of domestic chambers, with a hall, services and withdrawing chambers in stone along the cliff top (Fig 5). He also constructed the main entrance façade (Fig 2). This comprises a central gatehouse with an outer fortification or barbican (Fig 4) flanked by towers at each outward corner of the castle. The pairing of the towers masks their colossal scale. Both are prodigy buildings, taller than anything comparable of the period in England. Each principal floor within them is vaulted, an astonishing expense, and seems to have served as a self-contained lodging.

The towers have been known since at least 1644 as Caesar’s Tower and Guy’s Tower, names suggestive of deep history. If the names are medieval, the latter could be an architectural evocation of the tower on which the legendary Guy of Warwick experienced his conversion to Christ’s service. Whatever the case, this building has long enjoyed admiration and, as early as the 15th century, inspired copies at Cardiff (another Beauchamp possession) and Raglan Castles. Curiously, the Earl did not build on the motte, the natural focus of the castle. He did, however, create a gateway on an octagonal plan immediately beside it (Fig 3). This highly unusual form suggests a connection with royal building projects in Wales.

Beauchamp might have begun redeveloping Warwick Castle at any time from 1329, but it’s likely that he only acquired the necessary resources a decade or more later. His additions to the castle could also have grown in scale as time went on. Might his appointment as Marshal of England in 1344; or the first formal gathering of the Knights of the Garter on St George’s Day, 1349; or the victory at Poitiers in 1356, at which the Earl fought, have prompted fresh building initiatives? Certainly, despite the striking overall uniformity of the buildings attributed to him, close analysis of the fabric shows that there are minor changes in such details as the moulding of vault ribs. This could suggest a prolonged period of construction and the involvement of different masons.

What can be said with confidence is that a starting date in the mid 1340s would agree with the dating of one building that bears close technical comparison with what seem to be the very earliest additions to Warwick. This is the castle built at nearby Maxstoke by William Clinton, a close companion of Edward III (and a descendant of the builder of Kenilworth), which was licensed by the King in 1345. The designer of Maxstoke clearly knew the character of Warwick well and even created elaborate chimneypots that evoke in miniature its main 14th-century towers.

Both in scale and form, however, the most obvious parallel for Beauchamp’s domestic apartments at Warwick is the outstanding royal building project of the late 14th century. This was the palace begun in the upper ward of Windsor Castle by Edward III in 1359, which was paid for by the proceeds of Poitiers. It incorporated a single coherent frontage comprising a hall, chapel and chamber, raised on a huge vaulted undercroft. Ideas from Windsor also informed rebuilding work at Kenilworth by the King’s brother, John of Gaunt, in the 1370s and, in a neat symmetry, these also relate back to Warwick. In particular, they evoke Beauchamp’s last major architectural project, the construction from 1367 of a suitably magnificent collegiate church at Warwick, now the parish church of St Mary (Country Life, April 16, 2025).

When Beauchamp died in 1369, he was succeeded by his son and namesake. Thomas, 11th Earl of Warwick, certainly finished his father’s work to the collegiate church and he may also have had to complete the castle buildings, because the usually reliable 17th-century antiquarian, William Dugdale, cites a payment of £395 towards Guy’s Tower in a medieval account of 1393/94, now frustratingly lost. The Earl also entered further into his father’s enthusiasm for Guy of Warwick. A sculpture of the hero was carved for the choir of the collegiate church and a suit of tapestries ‘wrought with the arms and story of Guy of Warwick’ hung in the castle in 1399. Guy’s armour, sword and harness are also mentioned in his will. These, and such other imagined relics as Guy’s poringer, can still be seen in the castle today.

The castle continued to evolve through the 15th century. In the 1420s, Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick, another flower of English chivalry, created a huge stable complex outside the walls of the castle strikingly decorated in plaster of Paris. This was later demolished, but something of its scale is apparent in the surviving 16th-century stable at Kenilworth, which seems to be a copy of that at Warwick. The Spy Tower was probably added to the withdrawing apartments in the 1470s by George, Duke of Clarence, who married Isabel Neville, the co-heiress of the Warwick estates (Fig 7). With large windows and access to the roof leads, it offered spectacular views over the neighbouring park.

Warwick subsequently passed to the Duke’s brother, the future Richard III, and thus into royal ownership. Richard entertained ambitious plans for the castle and began a massive artillery tower to reinforce its defences, but construction was cut short by his fall from power in 1485. What remains of this building now forms part of the line of the castle walls (Fig 8). Henry VIII repaired the castle, but it was in the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I that it acquired renewed significance, as we will explore next week.

See more details about visiting the castle at the Warwick Castle website.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 10, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Before he drafted the plans for Charleston, South Carolina, the philosopher John Locke was already thinking about religious tolerance. In his Two Tracts on Government, written from 1660 to 1662 but not published until long after his death, Locke was actually pretty down on the very freedom of conscience he would become canonical for championing. ‘In every commonwealth there must be supreme power,’ he writes in these earlier, rarely discussed works. This reticence to express the values he became famous for is often put down to Locke cutting his cloth to suit the absolutist Stuart kings; his liberal turn came after their fall goes the story. Yet this change also came after he planned a new town in the American colonies.

Locke had joined the staff of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a medical capacity, but once his political skills were noted, he was promoted to private secretary. At the time Shaftesbury was not only Chancellor of the Exchequer, but one of The Lords Proprietors of Carolina; a coterie of colonising landowners with legal privileges emanating from ownership of these apparently virgin lands. Shaftesbury and Locke together drafted a document that offered English settlers inducements consisting of land, religious toleration and limited political representation. (Limits that would prove to be highly problematic towards the end of the 18th century). The plan offered Locke a chance to rationalise society to its purest balance; accepting order and risk to achieve freedom and thereby taking a good bet on some prosperity.

Locke's role as the city planner was not simply legal, but spatial and included the creation of a regional plan across the whole of the Carolinas. Charles Town, as it was called, was allocated 12,000 acres, with a further 12,000-acre area for settlers and the colony’s nobility. Counties and towns would be the administrative units. Locke drew up plans to ensure that riverfront plots were narrow but deep, to ensure that the number of properties were high and access to the water was for the many and not the few. Informal settlements were prohibited. Street grids would exist for even the smallest settlement. Each planned town, from Charles Town down, was ‘to be laid out into large, straight and regular streets, and sufficient room left for a wharf if it be upon a navigable river’.

The settlement became Charleston when the focus of the colony moved slightly down the coast. Its relationship to England is far closer than is generally given credit and not because it was designed by one of the nation’s key philosophers when he was still in a secretarial position. The intent was to prevent overdevelopment that would impede access and prevent overcrowding. The plan for Charleston was written following the Great Fire of 1666, after which a City of London edict established a buffer along much of the Thames in which construction was prohibited. The raised promenade at the tip of the Charleston peninsula is a vestige of it; a corner of the USA that is forever Putney.

It doesn’t take long to wander through Charleston’s old town (or ‘south of Broad’ as it is known) to realise that Charleston for a Brit is legible as an utopian outgrowth of London; much as Welwyn Garden City was 250 years later. After the Great Fire, Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for a more rationalised capital were ignored; and the opportunity to rethink the city was gone, as the government dodged making compulsory land acquisitions and the existing landownership patterns were held over. Charleston was a chance to fulfil this desire for a new intellectual class to create a city from scratch. Although the plan standardised spatially the class system of early colonialism, it was itself based on rationalist principles and writing them down arguably made them easier to attack.

The impact of the London blaze can be sensed in many of the instructions in Locke’s letter, completed in May 1671. Streets should be ‘large, convenient and regular’. The specifications are unsurprisingly hierarchical given that Locke worked for a Lord. Principal streets were to be 80-feet wide, alleys from them 40-feet. Secondary streets were 60 feet, with back streets 30 feet. The street grid would form squares of 600 feet on each side. Lots associated with principal streets were standardized at 75 feet by 280 feet, while those for secondary streets were 60 feet by 285 feet. This mediation in scales is what makes the town so beautiful. Impressive frontages give way to intimate gardens down side streets.

Edinburgh’s New Town is an impressively rigorous piece of Georgian planning. It is however an austere experience living and working in it. The rigidity of the façades, the regularity of the scale: that is until one gets to its edges at Dean Village, the Water of Leith or Carlton Hill and the rhythm relents to meet the topography and the urban grain undulates. This subtlety of texture is built into Charleston, which being away from the centre of political power and filled with entrepreneurial new frontier types who brooked at rule making, was built out in many different ways — albeit according to the plan’s limits. Arrivals from the Caribbean, for example, built houses perpendicular to the street, so cooling breezes could run east to west along exposed verandahs, or piazzas as they are bizarrely called in these parts.

Charleston is a masterpiece of urban give and take. Locke never visited and never embraced his role as planner, so it is impossible to say whether it had any influence on his ideas about tolerance and freedom. Walking through the astonishing variety of Georgian architecture, wedded to the grid, it is very tempting to think that the way in which he reconciled ideas about individual liberty to public order through the ideas of privacy and public space, emerged from how an ideal new town might operate.

When George Devereux De Vere Capell, 7th Earl of Essex inherited Cassiobury House from his grandfather in 1892, it wasn’t, to be totally fair, in the rudest of health. But then, according to reports, neither was its new owner. His predecessors has invested considerably in rebuilding and decorating the family seat and stuffing it full with an impressive art collection, but fortunes had since dwindled.

In the 17th century, the sprawling Tudor pile had sprouted 'new' wings, designed by Hugh May and decorated with early examples of woodcarving by master craftsman Grinling Gibbons in what was believed to be his first major commission.

At the start of the 19th century, James Wyatt was brought in to modernise the property again. Thankfully, he left the majority of May and Gibbons’ work alone, but, externally, he added a somewhat controversial Neo-Gothic exterior and an orangery.

In the early 20th Century, a Country Life writer visited and their article struck a melancholic tone: 'Cassiobury has had its ups and downs, and is one of the too frequent examples that teach us that alteration is not always an improvement.'

When he inherited the house aged 35, Lord Essex was already a widower. His first wife, Ellenor, had died in 1885 at the tragically young age of 25 while in Cannes, leaving behind an infant son, Algernon, and a grieving husband.

Alone and not in the finest of financial positions, Lord Essex was forced into action. In 1893, he sold a myriad of valuable furniture and painting, including three works by J. M. W. Turner. And in December of the same year, he married the insuppressible Adele Beach Grant — an American socialist and vegetarianism activist. The wedding took place at St Margaret’s Church in the Palace of Westminster, and the bride wore a dress decorated with optimistic, silver sun rays. They honeymooned at Cassiobury.

Lady Essex was one of society’s savviest, smartest, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it, so-called 'Dollar Princesses'. Her father made his fortune building railroads, but it would appear that this was not just a marriage of convenience — they actually liked each other.

This attachment to one another would come in handy when it became apparent that Lord Essex had inherited his family's passion, and total lack of skill, for playing cards, and Grant's father did one bad deal too many.

Lady Essex was not one to sit and bemoan her ill fortune and in a 1901 Rocky Mountain News article, titled 'The Poorest Countess', the writer describes how 'with pluck and enterprise this charming noblewoman has set to work to earn her living.’

The article went on to explain that Lady Essex was the brains behind a company that leased, furnished and let London apartments and had made a 'snug sum', concluding 'the poorest countess in Great Britain' is 'the happiest also.'

In 1902, at the Coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark, Lady Essex was widely admired for her Russian-style Cartier tiara, reportedly fashioned from recycled diamonds from her family’s collection.

In 1904, Lady Essex announced that she was a vegetarian and began hosting fitness classes. The classes, which were held in fashionable Carlton House Terrace, comprised lifting and throwing exercises, and the swinging around of another exotic American import — the pumpkin.

By 1909, Lord and Lady Essex had rented out Cassiobury and auctioned off a few more artworks. Large swathes of parkland had also been sold to Watford Council for development purposes. And then the First World War hit. The grounds were quickly turned into a billeting area and, eventually, a Red Cross Hospital. Before the War's end, Lord Essex was hit by a taxi, suffered severe bruising and shock and, eight months later, was dead from an suspected heart attack.

Algernon took on the family title and Cassiobury, but was suffering from injuries sustained fighting at the front. In 1920, the 8th Earl made the decision to sell the house, but its poor condition made it impossible for him to find a buyer.

Further tragedy struck in late July 1922, when Adele, Dowager Countess of Essex, was discovered dead in her bath, also, seemingly, from a heart attack. Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, and Sir Winston Churchill attended the remarkable woman’s memorial service.

A few weeks later, it was announced that Cassiobury had been purchased by a syndicate who set about the stripping it, Grinling Gibbons and all. Little remained by 1927.

Two parts made their way back to the Dowager Countess's native New York: a large consignment of Tudor bricks and a magnificent staircase, later attributed to Edward Pearce, which is now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's (The Met) English Gallery.

And, finally, the magnificent Essex Tiara — it is still rented out, on occasion, by Cartier. Clementine Churchill wore it to the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, and more recently, in 2016, it adorned the head of pop princess Rihanna on the cover of W magazine. Like the sun rays on Adele’s wedding dress, her legacy still shines bright like a diamond.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

On August 23, 1760, the Revd Robert Hurton, the rector at Doddington, wrote an exasperated letter to the patron of his living, John Hussey Delaval. Work had just begun to renovate Doddington Hall, but progress seemed to the rector hopelessly slow and the chief contractor, the master carpenter Thomas Lumby, dilatory. Lumby had, he asserted, ‘received more cash than he has done work’ and he passed on the steward’s despairing assessment of the carpenter’s promises as being ‘like the wind, they blow as they list and he hears the sound thereof but cannot tell whence they come or whether they go for he can lay no hold on them’.

As explained last week, Doddington is an Elizabethan house built in the 1590s (Fig 1). It seems to have survived relatively little changed into the mid 18th century, but, in 1749, became one in a group of the large estates inherited by the colourful Delaval family. The chief of these estates were Seaton Delaval and Ford Castle, Northumberland, both of which became the property of Francis Blake Delaval in 1752. Extravagant, dissipated and an enthusiast for theatricals, his affairs had to be regularised by an Act of Parliament in 1755.

The Act authorised the mortgage of Ford and gave control of Francis’s remaining property to his younger brother, John. Doddington, meanwhile, remained a possession of the brothers’ widowed mother, Rhoda. In 1759, however, she bequeathed it to John and the house briefly became his seat; hence his initiative to remodel it a year later. His approach, moreover, was unusual for the period.

There was no cosmopolitan architect involved in the project; rather, John chose to direct the work himself. No less remarkable was the fact that he preserved almost unchanged the Elizabethan exterior of the house at the same time as entirely modernising the polite interiors. Even in the entrance hall — a favoured space for the celebration of lineage in great English houses — there is no decorative reference to his ancestry or the historic character of the building. All this is in striking contrast to the contemporary treatment of such early-17th-century buildings as Aston Hall, Birmingham, or Audley End, Essex.

The rebuilding of Doddington is well documented, both through surviving correspondence and in 18 volumes of accounts and receipts now at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. A valuable recent study that has focused on this material, as well as the outstanding associated collection of paintings in the hall, has been published online by the Paul Mellon Centre.

Work began at Doddington in the spring of 1760 — probably just after a second surviving inventory was taken of the contents — and was largely complete by the end of 1762. The leading figures involved were all local and included the surveyor John Dixon, the plasterer Matthew Rennison, the painter Robert Lilly and the unreliable, but evidently accomplished, master carpenter Lumby. The rector and the estate steward, William Portis (or Portes), also corresponded in detail about the project. The latter was a Scot joiner who had earlier worked at Seaton Sluice, the harbour on which the prosperity of Seaton Delaval depended.

In 1761, when the renovation of the house was in full swing, John both succeeded in buying his brother out of the Ford estate and in securing a baronetcy. Without abandoning Doddington, he now also began modernising Ford, a medieval castle. The two concurrent projects were undertaken in much the same spirit, making use of local expertise and respectful of the external character of the existing building (Country Life, February 3 and 10, 1994).

A certain amount can be reconstructed about Sir John’s internal redecoration of Doddington. Some of the rooms preserve traces of decorative wallpaper and emphatic use was also made of the colour blue, which enjoyed a particular vogue in the 1750s and early 1760s. It appeared, for example, in the original flock wallpaper of the drawing room over the hall (Fig 3) and was the dominant colour in the gallery at the top of the house. This latter room was otherwise transformed during the course of the work (Fig 8). All the windows along one side were blocked up to create space both for porcelain niches and an array of family portraits.

The most significant structural change to the interior of Doddington was the replacement of the main Elizabethan stair, which presumably looked hopelessly dated to Georgian eyes. Its successor was grandly conceived and completed in October 1762 at a cost of £197 8s 5d (Fig 2).

In July 1762, Portis reported that he was ‘hanging the tapestry in the 2 bedchambers adjoining the best staircase according to Lady Hussey Delaval’s orders’. These rooms are now known as the Holly and Yellow Bedrooms (Fig 4) and the tapestries in question are of 17th-century Flemish production. It is presumed that they had survived in the house and, given what has been already said about the character of the interior remodelling, it is odd that they were reconfigured at this time. Perhaps Lady Hussey Delaval had different tastes from her husband. Whatever the case, the tapestries in both rooms have recently been the object of an ambitious conservation project undertaken in collaboration with the University of Lincoln.

Sir John’s last positive contribution to Doddington was the reconstruction of the church beside the house. In a draft letter to the Bishop of Lincoln dated 1770, he observed that the building was ‘in a very ruinous condition and unfit for the performance of Divine Service [and] it will give me a great pleasure if your Lordship shall approve of my rebuilding it where it now stands at my expense’. It would seem that the bishop did not object. Some elements of the old church were recycled in the new structure and medieval detailing was copied with remarkable assurance (Fig 7). The tower, surmounted by a spire until the 20th century, incorporates a fine Gothic west door. Lumby was again the main contractor, albeit disappearing for a period to escape arrest for debt.

In the meantime, Sir John’s circumstances were transformed by the death, in 1771, of his childless elder brother. This brought the entailed Delaval estates into his ownership. By the terms of his mother’s will, however, Doddington ought at the same moment to have passed to his younger brother, Edward. Sir John objected, claiming to have spent £17,000 on improvements there. It was eventually agreed that Edward would receive an annuity from the estate, but the dispute estranged the brothers. Presumably out of spite, Sir John subsequently felled all the timber at Doddington with the exception of three ancient sweet chestnuts that still grow beside the house.

As a compounding difficulty, in 1775, Sir John’s son, heir and namesake died. His body was brought to the newly completed church at Doddington for burial, the interior of which was painted black for the occasion. His parents, doubtless heartbroken, did not attend the funeral and Sir John began a mausoleum at Seaton Delaval to receive the body. Yet the mausoleum, now ruinous, was seemingly never consecrated and the younger John remains at Doddington, his grave unmarked.

It’s not really clear what the status of Doddington was for the remainder of Sir John’s long life. That said, an inventory of 1786 records a fully furnished house filled with paintings and furniture. Edward was nearly 80 by the time he succeeded his brother in 1808. When he died in 1814, however, the Delaval estate was broken up. The main beneficiary was Edward’s nephew, Sir Jacob Astley, but Doddington Hall and much of its estate passed to his wife and daughter, both called Sarah.

The daughter married James Gunman, collector of Customs at Dover, who predeceased her. She, by the terms of her will in 1825, subsequently and surprisingly bequeathed her fortune and her interest in Doddington to Lt-Col George Jarvis, a former neighbour in Dover. He was the youngest of 21 children born to an Antiguan plantation owner and a veteran both of the Peninsular War and the ill-fated Walcheren Campaign. In 1829, Sarah’s mother also died and bequeathed the contents of Doddington to the colonel, who, the following year, successfully bought out the remaining Delaval interests in the property and reunited the entire estate. He remarried and, in later life, he became an accomplished woodcarver. His tools and examples of his sculpted panels survive both in the house and the church. The property remains in the hands of his descendants to the present.

The colonel’s son, George, inherited the hall in 1851 and undertook extensive repairs to the building. His initials today ornament the weather vane of the central dome of the house and his portrait by Charles Lutyens, the father of the celebrated architect, remains in the collection. During the lifetime of his son, another George, there appeared the History of Doddington (1897), a remarkable piece of antiquarian research by the Revd R. E. G. Cole. It remains the standard account of the house and the families associated with it.

In 1961, the great-grandson of the colonel, Antony Jarvis, took over the management of the estate. His parents had opened the house to the public in 1954 and secured funding from the Historic Buildings Council for repairs. Mr Jarvis and his wife, Victoria — they were married in 1962 — undertook important restoration work to the building and further developed visitor arrangements including school visits. Their eldest daughter, Claire, and her husband, James Birch, a former chairman of the Historic Houses Association (now Historic Houses), have built impressively on these foundations since they assumed responsibility for the estate in 2006.

One aspect of their work has been the development of the commercial potential of Doddington with a host of different businesses. There is a farm shop, supplied by the restored walled garden, the Giant Bike Shop and a home store, plus the award-winning Grain Store Café, Restaurant and Bar, holiday cottages and padel courts. Doddington can accommodate weddings and manages a busy calendar of events and concerts. Cumulatively, these initiatives have made Doddington a destination in its own right, but the couple’s contribution goes much deeper.

Mr and Mrs Birch have actively encouraged collaborative research into the house and its collections and the Doddington Conservation Charity, established in 2006, has helped make possible the tapestry conservation project, described above. Meanwhile, new attractions have been established on the estate. These include a building to house the historic farm wagon collection assembled by Antony Jarvis and also, in the roof space above it, the MC Tsen Collection of British Military uniforms (Fig 5). This comprises more than 900 uniforms and 3,000 accessories made from 1881 to 1945 and is on long-term loan. The collection is accessible by appointment.

There have been changes, as well, to the gardens and formal landscape, including the creation of a pyramid at the end of the main avenue (Fig 6). Built in 2014 from the broken concrete foundations of a disused grain store, it incorporates a small shelter for walkers as well as accommodation for bats and owls. Perhaps most remarkable of all, however, are the ongoing plans to develop the wider estate, which has become the object of an ambitious nature-recovery initiative. ‘Wilder Doddington’ is a project planned over 400 years that aims to revive ecosystems on the estate’s marginal land. To this end, arable farming ceased in 2021, artificial drainage systems were blocked and a herd of rare-breed Lincoln Red cattle introduced. The intention is to make this project accessible both through educational initiatives and the creation of permissive access trails.

When Country Life last wrote up Doddington in 1936, the writer concluded by assuring readers that the house was on the National Trust’s schedule of potential acquisitions. Had the Trust acquired Doddington, however, we all know exactly what the house would now be like. How uplifting, by comparison, to have a trailblazing illustration of the ways in which a historic estate can thrive, develop and contribute in the 21st century. How inspiring, too, to see its collections researched, cherished and even expanded.

Doddington Hall is open to visitors — see their website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If you ever find yourself stuck in a jam on Queensway — Birmingham’s inner ring road — spare a thought for a) the most influential designer of the Gothic Revival movement, b) pop star Cher, and c) a long-lost architectural gem.

The story starts in 1838: Queen Victoria had been on the throne just a year when Bishop Thomas Walsh decided to commission a brand new Catholic Cathedral — the first structure of its kind to be built in Britain since Henry VIII’s Reformation. The man charged with bringing this vision to life was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

Pugin was a lover of all things medieval. His devotion and promotion of the Gothic Revival movement saw him design hundreds of buildings and their interiors, many of which inspire awe to this very day. The most iconic are the interiors of the Houses of Commons and Lords, and Elizabeth Tower, known more affectionally as Big Ben. All of which had the central missive of being beautiful, but always useful. Frippery, in Pugin’s book, was not to be indulged.

Progress in Birmingham was swift. The cornerstone of St Chad’s Cathedral was laid in November 1839. By June 1841, the building had been consecrated. Over the road, Pugin concentrated his talents into his first attempt at marrying his beloved, Gothic style and domestic ecclesiastical architecture. The result was the magnificent Bishop’s House.

The architect firmly believed the property should project the same magnificence as the church, but should absolutely not copy the 'violent… drawing-room of an Anglo-Protestant prebendary, with its piano, nick-nacks, mirrors and ottomans!'

The main house was entered through a a small cloister on Bath Street. Inside, there were, among other rooms, private chambers for the bishop and each of his priests, a private chapel, a grand hall or dining room capable of seating 60, and eight 'cells' for visiting guests.

Pugin papered the inside with handmade wallpaper and elaborate encaustic tiles hand made at Mintons, and decorated with heraldic shields, beasts and fleur-de-lys. He designed light fittings, chairs and even a fire surround shaped like a bishop’s mitre.

Somehow, the house and cathedral made it through the First and Second World Wars, largely unscathed, despite the a bomb falling through the roof of the latter. The explosive bounced across the floor and hit a central heating pipe which, in turn, flooded the floor and extinguished any flames.

However, the bishop's house's luck ran out shortly afterwards. In 1941, Birmingham's city engineer and surveyor, Herbert Manzoni, who believed that the city's buildings held 'little of real worth in our architecture', was busy reimagining things. His plans required the wholesale destruction of vast swathes of Georgian and Victorian buildings and the construction of tower blocks and motorways, including three new-fangled ring roads.

In 1946, lawmakers passed an Act of Parliament approving Manzoni’s ambitious plans and objections fell on deaf ears. The Catholic church was told that if they foot the bill for rerouting the ring road in whose line the Bishop's House now stood, it would be spared. Unfortunately, they were unable to take on the mammoth expense and the house was sold to the council for £44,000.

Country Life was invited to record the exterior and some of the interiors before the bulldozers were called in — though the majority of photographs remain unpublished, until now.

On April 29, 1960, the magazine published an article about the discovery of a first edition of the Old Testament, printed at the English College in Douai, during the demolition. It was taken, along with the house's library to the St Chad’s crypt for safekeeping.

Other items saved from the wrecking ball include two Glastonbury chairs produced to Pugin’s designs by George Myers and a fireplace, which both now reside at V&A Storehouse in East London. A Gothic Revival brass hexafoil corona light also survived the wrecking ball and somehow turned up in Malibu in California, where it dangled from the ceiling of Cher's beachside mansion. In 2009, it sold at auction with Bonham's.

And as for St Chad’s Cathedral? It is marooned on an 'island' in the middle of Queensway, but instead of Bishop's House, it now looks onto nine lanes of traffic, an unremarkable hotel and an NCP car park.

Pugin once said that 'in pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose.' While the road might have some purpose, it arguably has little meaning. If he could speak now, he'd surely borrow Cher's words: 'If I Could Turn Back Time'.

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On November 26, 1607, the parson of Doddington succinctly noted the burial of ‘Mr Thomas Tailor’ in the parish register. No monument was subsequently raised to his memory, but, arguably, none was needed because Tailor has a spectacular architectural memorial. Overshadowing the church in which his funeral service was read is the house he built, Doddington Hall. Outwardly, its warm brick exterior detailed with stone would still be immediately recognisable to him. The interiors of the house, however, have been transformed over time. Not only were the principal rooms redecorated in the 18th century, but, over the past two decades, both the house and the wider estate have undergone an imaginative and trailblazing renewal.

For someone with the wealth to build Doddington, Tailor is a surprisingly shadowy figure, the events of his early life masked by a common name. Both his parentage and the date of his birth are unknown, nor did he possess a coat of arms, a distinguishing mark of Elizabethan gentility. His first wife, Bridgit, whom he married in 1550, was already twice widowed and well-connected both within the city and county of Lincoln. She died two years later and Thomas seems to have supported his stepchildren with what one described in their will as ‘wonderful friendship’. Ten years later, in 1562, he married again to Jane Hollingworth, the daughter of a mayor and draper of Lincoln. After a gap of six years — possibly she was very young at the time of her marriage — they had five children, all of them baptised in St Martin’s Church, Lincoln.

By 1571, Tailor was acting as a public notary, which suggests a legal training, and, in 1580–83, he copied out in his own hand the official record of the visitation of the diocese of Lincoln by the reforming Bishop, John Cooper. It was almost certainly his official involvement with the vast see of Lincoln that allowed him to begin acquiring land, but quite where the money came from is not clear. The transfers of property brought about by the Reformation and the ongoing despoliation of the bishopric probably played a part. Whatever the case, among the manors he secured was Doddington, which he jointly purchased in 1593 for the massive sum of £4,850 and in complex circumstances.

Doddington is mentioned in Domesday as a possession of Westminster Abbey. That connection continued until the 1540s, but, in the meantime, it was held by the Picot and Burgh families. Their manor house probably stood on the site of the present hall. William, 4th Lord Burgh, sold the property in 1586, at which time the new owner, John Savile, disposed of one part of the manor. Its purchaser, George Anton, subsequently became MP for Lincoln, the Recorder of the city and a son-in-law of Thomas Tailor. In the 1593 purchase, therefore, Tailor acted in concert not only with George Anton, but his brother-in-law, Leon Hollingworth, another notary involved in the 1580 Lincoln visitation, Henry Christofer, and his 14-year-old son and heir, another Thomas.

This last inclusion strongly implies that the elder Thomas was planning to make Doddington a dynastic seat, although he didn’t immediately buy out his fellow owners. Moreover, given that he must have been at least in his mid sixties by the time of the purchase, he was surely keen to get on with building it at once. No documentation survives recording the work, but repairs to the roof in 1858 revealed a ‘leaden plate, with the initials I. W. and the date 1600… on the top of the central cupola’. It is not clear who the initials refer to, but if the roof was structurally complete by this date it seems reasonable to assume that the foundation stone was laid in about 1595.

By tradition, the brick used to build the house was made on site. Using this material may have been an economy, but the locality also has excellent stone readily available. The use of brick, in other words, may equally have been an aesthetic choice, its warm colour intended to contrast attractively with the cut masonry detailing of the windows, doors and quoins. This combination of materials, popularised by royal building projects of the early 15th century, became a commonplace of Tudor fine architecture.

Doddington is a compactly planned building that integrates all the rooms necessary for grand domestic living into a coherent and symmetrical structure. It comprises a central block of three storeys that is bookended to either side by cross ranges of the same height. A regular grid of windows extends around the whole building, accentuating the regularity of the design. Substantial chimneystacks rise up the outer walls (Fig 5) and, originally, the parapets were punctuated by small semi-circular gables. The main approach to the house is enclosed within a walled forecourt entered through a gatehouse, creating a domesticated castle. The front and back are close images of each other, but the former (Fig 1) incorporates three square turrets, two at the angles between the main block and the flanking ranges, and a central porch.

One turret incorporates a service stair. Around the porch door is a modest flourish of Classical detailing, practically the only ornament on the strikingly austere exterior. Where the three turrets rise above the parapets, they are surmounted by domed chambers accessible from the leads of the roof. Two of these — the third is a stair — undoubtedly served as banqueting houses, where guests could retire to enjoy delicacies and the views. From this vantage point, Lincoln Cathedral breaks the horizon six miles away (Fig 4). Visible in the opposite direction is the 19th-century spire of Harby, Nottinghamshire, the manor in which Edward I’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, died in 1290.

Passing through the front door, the modern visitor is transported into an early Georgian interior (Fig 2). Ignoring this decoration, however, the essential configuration of Elizabethan rooms remains. The hall extends to the right of the entrance and, at the far end of the room — the former site of the dais for the high table — a door gives access to a great stair. The Elizabethan predecessor of the present stair rose the full height of the building and connected the hall to a great chamber and long gallery on the two floors above. It also gave access to the withdrawing rooms and bedrooms (Fig 6) that occupy both cross ranges. At ground level to the left of the front porch were the kitchen and services.

The plan of the house is conventional, but the discipline of the design, as well as its height and austerity, can be paralleled in the buildings by the celebrated Elizabethan architect Robert Smythson; in particular, with the much larger house Smyth-son created for George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, at Worksop Manor in the 1580s. Whether he designed Doddington, however, is an open question. Tailor had plenty of connections with London and might equally have requested an architect or surveyor within the orbit of the Court and the City to supply him with plans for his house. A local mason would then have realised the design.

This was common practice at the time. John Thorpe, for example, a London-based surveyor, supplied plans for Vincent Skinner, the secretary of Lord Burghley, to build a new seat at Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire, in about 1607. Thorpe’s surviving collection of architectural drawings also includes an elevation and plan for a compact house loosely resembling Doddington at Noseley, Leicestershire, probably of 1604. These projects, however, and most of the other buildings comparable to Doddington, including Quenby Hall, Leicestershire, date to the early 17th century. Assuming Doddington was begun in the 1590s, Smythson’s buildings are its most likely source of inspiration.

Tailor died in 1607 a wealthy man with an estate of more than 9,000 acres in Lincolnshire. His businesslike will directs the partial cancellation and redistribution of large debts, including one of £1,300 transferred to his grand-daughter and eventual heir, Elizabeth Anton. It was his son and namesake, however, who immediately inherited the property. Little is known about Thomas the younger, but he was long lived and, generations later, stories — possibly invented — circulated about his eccentricity and practical jokes. He was in his sixties when the Civil War broke out and seems to have taken no part in the hostilities. Remarkably, there is no record of Dodding-ton being looted or damaged.

In the meantime, Elizabeth Anton married Sir Edward Hussey, the head of another local gentry family with its seat at Honington. He was created a baronet in 1611 and with his entire family entered energetically into the Royalist cause in the 1640s. His loyalty came at a high price. He lost a brother at Newark and a son, John, at the Battle of Gainsborough. John’s armour — a buff coat and pikeman’s cuirass — pierced by a musket ball survives at Doddington (Country House treasures, January 28). He was subsequently made liable for a massive fine of £8,750, but died in 1648 before it was fully paid.

When Elizabeth, Lady Hussey, came into her Doddington inheritance as a widow in 1652, the estate offered both a means of settling her financial affairs and an independent seat. Despite residing in the house, at her death in 1658 she requested burial with her husband at Honington. This established a family pattern that has left Doddington church curiously bereft of monuments.

Doddington passed directly from Lady Hussey to her grandson, Sir Thomas Hussey, who was only 19 when he entered into the estate. His income of about £2,500 a year guaranteed him a leading role in local affairs. He welcomed the Restoration in 1660 and served as an MP from 1681. His Tory sympathies made him slow to offer support to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that brought William and Mary to the throne. They may also explain why he didn’t rebuild Doddington, but preserved the Elizabethan house until his death in 1706.

It’s hard to reconstruct the house interior as Sir Thomas knew it, but the so-called Brown Parlour at the head of the hall with its fine panelling of about 1700 is presumably his (Fig 7). The garden setting of the house, meanwhile, is depicted in an engraving from Britannia Illustrata (1707). It shows the building at the heart of a patchwork of walled compartments (Fig 3) with stable and service courts to one side and gardens to the other. There are also axial views planted with avenues to the front and rear.

During the early 18th century, the estate passed twice through the female line, first through Sir Thomas’s daughter, Sarah, to her husband, Robert Apreece, of Washingley Hall, Huntingdonshire (confusingly, Sarah’s sister, Elizabeth, occupied the house for a period and with her husband, Richard Ellys, made minor alterations to it; the Brown Parlour might also be theirs). Then, in 1749, it was transferred through Sarah’s daughter, Rhoda, to her husband, Francis Blake Delaval.

Francis, who began his career in the Royal Navy, had already inherited two large estates in Northumberland, Ford Castle from his maternal grandfather in 1718 and Seaton Delaval in 1723, from his uncle. The latter brought with it the liability of a vast new house begun by Vanbrugh in 1720 and still in the early stages of construction. Rhoda’s hand and fortune, secured in 1724, were probably decisive in allowing him to continue this building.

Francis died after falling down the steps of his still-incomplete new house in 1752 and Seaton Delaval passed to the couple’s notoriously profligate eldest son, Sir Francis. Rhoda, however, kept hold of Doddington as a widow and an inventory of the house made on January 16, 1753, shows that the building was well furnished. It also names her bedroom within it, implying that she regularly resided there.

In 1759, Rhoda bequeathed the property to her second son, John, who was already effectively running the family’s affairs. John changed his name to Hussey Delaval in acknowledgement of her inheritance and, the following year, began modernising the house. His work was not only grandly conceived, but shows an intriguing sensitivity towards the history of the building, as we will discover next week.

Find out more at the Doddington Hall website.

This feature originally appeared in the May 27, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Louvain-la-Neuve; a new town that was begun in 1972 on a plateau of farmland, in French-speaking Walloonia, just south of Brussels, wears the trauma of its creation well. This neo-medieval settlement is inadvertently the result — a literal pièce de resistance — of a political struggle by the Flemish majority to overturn Belgium’s post-war status quo. While Paris in 1968 was full of the French rebelling, like Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One, against anything going, Dutch-speaking Belgians protested for an end to Francophone dominance in their country. Probably their most successful drive was to remove French as the dominant language at the nation’s most prestigious university in Leuven and when they were successful in doing so, a new university was needed.

The Catholic and generally right-wing French speaking rump expelled from Leuven clearly still had some clout and wanting their university to be autonomous, demanded a separate new town. It is funny to think of conservative Francophones strolling around Cumbernauld, a robust new town between Glasgow and Edinburgh, on a fact-finding mission and deciding, probably rightly, that its now desolate castle-like megastructure on top of a hill was not the way to go. Their determination to instead rival the original town of Leuven with pedestrianised streetscapes has to be commended, particularly given the proximity of the new plot to that well-known site of thwarted ambition: Waterloo. More auspiciously however, Louvain-la-Neuve was very close to the railhead of a line from Brussels from which a spur was built in 1975.

The masterplan was designed by three figures: Raymond Lemaire, Jean-Pierre Blondel, and Pierre Laconte. Of this group, Lemaire, an art historian, had the highest profile before work began, although this was not in planning. A famous art historian, he was the lead author of the Venice Charter: a framework for the conservation and restoration of historic buildings which still guides professionals around the world. For the planner Laconte, however, it was the single great act of his life’s work and he spent the rest of his life dining out on it on various non-governmental bodies, representing Belgium at the Kyoto Conference of Parties on Climate Change. Blondel was an architect of technically daring Modernist buildings, including a trio of astonishing pavilions at the 1958 Brussels World’s fair that are sadly no longer around.

This mix of architectural verve, married with a respect for ecclesiastical and educational forms and a certain social conservatism, helped inform the unique urban plan of Louvain-la-Neuve. It also accounts for its unique, almost operatic architectural style. The town centre is a mix of modern and medieval. The commercial centre of the town, although pedestrianised, sits on top of a massive concrete plinth beneath which lies a vast subterranean parking lot with 6,000 spaces. (Even today this zone lacks signage, meaning newcomers to the town are wont to lose their cars in the cavernous space.) Around the commercial centre, up into the elevated section of the town run a series of paths off which is placed many of the wonderful student residences, bespoke buildings designed by individual architects.

The building of the town makes the particular origins of the new town legible. The American architect Louis Kahn was invited to design the University Halls, modelled on the original Leuven versions, albeit with a railway station in the basement and a commercial area on the ground floor. Khan’s later cosmic Brutalism, rather than his earlier academic Modernism, was seen as the perfect blend of modernity and spiritual values for the catholic university. Kahn, though, declined as he was struggling to complete his serene parliament complex in Bangladesh, recommending his student Yves Lepère, who turned in a very good impression of a Kahn; all arches and suspended façades helping dissolve the austere rhetoric of 20th century corporate Modernism with more intimate, primal geometries.

The rest of the architecture inhabits an uneasy marriage of tradition and modernity with some hits and some misses. André Jacqmain's Library of Science is a textured version of high Modernism. The entrance stairs and balconies, in which the shuttering from the concrete pour is highly visible, are pure university theatre; made for posing from, book in hand. The Church of St. Francis of Assisi, with its distinctly Middle Earth looking bell tower, was consecrated by Pope John Paul II on his visit to Louvain-la-Neuve in 1985; a site which now seems more emblematic of his papacy than many others closer to Rome. Louvain-la-Neuve is a place in which the traditions of the church could be expressed in new ways; locating the church in the daily woes of humanity following the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

It is hard to imagine today, but a decade into the life of Louvain-la-Neuve, it was deemed a failure as the financial climate slowed its build out (a common problem in all new towns which always face different economic climates during their long, early formation). 10,000 students live in the town, although that number triples during the day. The student housing has plenty of character: porthole windows and crazily pitched roofs abound. It is purpose built for sharing though and subsidised down to around €300 a month.

Of course the desire to make it in the immediate term a truly mixed settlement (academic and non-academic) was never really viable. However, Louvain looks and feels like a place. One only has to look at the newer section across the main road which is an academic-campus-as-business-park to understand the quality of what Louvain-le-Neuve began with and to be fair this is what has happened in the suburbs of towns that are home to venerable institutions such as Cambridge in the UK. This singular new town may yet reach the venerable age of the original from whence it was grafted.

War, neglect, fire and/or insufficient means were generally the main reasons why thousands of Britain’s architectural masterpieces were destroyed in the 20th century. But one former house in Wiltshire has the dubious double distinction of being one of the last great houses in the country to be deliberately destroyed, and for that destruction to have been due to the wrong paperwork.

By the 18th century, the Fonthill estate in Wiltshire was vast. The land had a centuries-long history of demolishing grand structures when they had been determined to have reached their sell-by date. Indeed, four large properties on the sprawling lands had been erected by the then-landowners, the Beckfords, then eviscerated over the centuries.

By 1897, half of the estate was owned by the art collector Alfred Morrison, the second son of a wealthy Edinburgh textile merchant. Alfred died at the end of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year, leaving Fonthill House to his wife, Mabel. Probate records reveal he also left a staggering £869,174 12s 6d (comfortably over £100million in 2026) to his brothers, Charles and Walter Morrison. His oldest son, Hugh, received a generous allowance, and the rest of the Fonthill land on which to build his own home.

Hugh determined to build high (ish) on a lesser wave of rolling Wiltshire chalkland opposite the old drove road of Great Ridge. Little Ridge house was to become a truly unique, 20th century building. For a start, it wasn’t a new build at all.

Architect and stonemason Detmar Blow had traveled to nearby Salisbury Plain in 1901 to advise on repairs to Stonehenge — a severe storm had blown over two of the great monument’s stones on New Year’s Eve, 1900. Hugh, in search of an architect, is presumed to have met Blow at the neolithic wonder, found a meeting of minds with the disciple of the Arts-and-Crafts movement, and the pair, along with Hugh’s wife, Mary, set about designing their new home. (As an aside, Stonehenge wasn’t reconstructed until 1958, but that, as they say, is a story for another day).

At the heart of Blow’s ‘new build’ was a grand, 17th century manor house from the neighbouring village of Berwick St Leonard. The aging property had reportedly been reduced to being used as a barn by the 19th century. By the birth of the 1900s, when Blow and Hugh conspired to save it, it stood roofless and forlorn.

The remains were dismantled and documented stone by stone. Cosseted in straw, they were painstakingly transported three miles down the road by traction engine for reassembly on Fonthill land.

The manor house formed the historic skeleton of Little Ridge, with Blow and his team of local craftsmen providing abundant, ample flesh around the aging bones. Plaster, wood and stone decoration and embellishments inside the home were all hand-crafted by artisans. The result was a masterclass in traditional methods.

The Country Life feature of 1912, from which the accompanying photos to this article were first published, was most effusive with its praise for this formidable piece of recycling. ‘No one knows better than Mr Blow the difficulty of wedding the airy spirit of three centuries ago to the sturdy need today, and no one has learnt to overcome it more successfully.’

Soon after the new/old house was finished, Hugh and Mary, who had been trying to conceive for many years, finally received the happy news they were to become parents. They immediately called Blow back, who swiftly designed (the designs were charmingly called ‘The John Wing’) and built a connecting nursery wing on the property. During this time, baby John was born.

In 1915, a fire broke out in Fonthill House, the property owned by Hugh’s mother, Mabel. While the local fire brigade were successful in saving the main house, the servants quarters were wrecked and the main house damaged by the necessity of fire equipment hurriedly being pulled through the rooms. It stood empty.

Mabel had long since moved away to London. Hugh and Mary had their own house, so the decision was eventually taken in 1921 to demolish Fonthill House. And here is where the fatal mistake was made in some local paperwork.

Following the demolition of Fonthill House in 1921, Little Ridge was renamed. It was renamed Fonthill House. Fast forward to the late 1960s and a very changed Britain. Struggling under the burden of an array of crippling taxation measures, falling yields, raging inflation and other joyless woes, John, now Baron Margadale of Islay, took the decision to demolish his parent’s large and costly incarnation of Fonthill House and erect a more modest property on the little ridge of land.

Destruction of the unique house should, however, by this time never have been allowed. A swift check by local officials presumed it was the property damaged by fire in 1915. Lord Margadale was told he wouldn’t need planning permission to tear the house down. The demolition contractors were called in.

The Victorian Society, realising the error, mounted a swift campaign to stop the demolition. They pleaded with the Department of the Environment to issue an emergency spot-listing to protect the house. It fell on deaf ears when they, too, presumed the house to be the fire-damaged property from 1915. By the time the error was uncovered, it was too late. Like the stones at Stonehenge that New Year’s Eve in 1900, Little Ridge had fallen.

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In a quiet corner of Dorset is a village church with a surprising link to the Crystal Palace. That structure, built to house the 1851 Great Exhibition, was a marvel of modern engineering, so new in its modular construction that the issue of its decoration caused a national furore. In the run up to the opening 175 years ago, architects, artists and interested amateurs contributed to what The Builder called the ‘Great Paint Question’. Periodicals including the Illustrated London News and the Athenaeum speculated about how best to colour the iron beams and girders of Joseph Paxton’s vast glasshouse (Fig 1). The man officially tasked with creating the paint scheme was Owen Jones and, four years earlier, it had been he who designed the interior of St Bartholomew’s Church in Sutton Waldron.

The survival of an entire paint scheme by Jones is rare enough, but its importance goes far beyond that. In his use of the primary colours at Sutton Waldron, Jones demonstrated the theories that would inspire his application of red, blue and yellow to the Crystal Palace. St Bartholomew’s, therefore, offers a unique insight into how one of the most significant buildings of the Victorian age would have looked.

Unlike his well-known contemporaries A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris, Jones is no longer a household name. Described by contemporaries as a shy, unprepossessing man, the Great Exhibition ‘summoned him from the comparative seclusion of his ordinary professional engagements… and suddenly made his name one of the most famous and most severely criticised among all the celebrities of his time and country’. There was no bigger job and no more important stage on which to present his views on applied polychromy.

The ultimate success of his work in 1851 dramatically changed his career trajectory, placing him at the heart of mid-19th-century debates on British design and art education. Born in 1809 and trained as an architect, Jones was instrumental in the creation of the V&A Museum and is best remembered as the author of classic design text The Grammar of Ornament, continuously in print since 1856. This book, consulted by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Comfort Tiffany, brought Jones international fame.

It might seem strange then, that Jones’s input is not mentioned in the very detailed account of the consecration of St Bartholomew’s Church, published by the Sherborne Mercury in November 1847. We know he was responsible because the church appears in a handwritten list of Jones’s work held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It must be that he was employed as a sub-contractor to the church’s architect George Alexander; he had yet to become worthy of notice. A decade later, the situation was very different when Jones was called in as an expert to consult on the decoration of Carlisle Cathedral in Cumbria, following a dispute between the architect Ewan Christian and the cathedral chapter. They pursued his recommendation that the panels of the choir ceiling be painted ‘bright azure, powdered with gold stars’ and the effect of a star-studded blue sky can still be enjoyed in Carlisle Cathedral as it can in the chancel at Sutton Waldron (Fig 2).

St Bartholomew’s replaced an old Saxon church that had fallen into disrepair (Fig 5). Rebuilding became possible after the dynamic rector Anthony Huxtable married Maria Sarah Langston in 1840. Daughter of the late John Langston, merchant banker and politician of Sarsden House in Oxfordshire, she brought considerable wealth to the partnership and the couple spent £3,000 on their new church.

This was a substantial sum for a 200-seat church with a nave and single aisle. St John’s, Notting Hill, London, designed by George Alexander during his brief partnership with John Hargrave Stevens in 1845, cost more than twice as much, but was far larger, with seats for 1,500 worshippers. Much of the Huxtables’ budget must have been dedicated to the interior and it is this that differentiates Sutton Waldron from contemporary churches built by Alexander, including two in the immediate vicinity at Enmore Green, Shaftesbury (1843), and St Mary’s, Motcombe (1846).

Alexander (1810–85) came from Corsham in Wiltshire. According to research by the late Andrew Saint, he was made an early fellow of the RIBA in 1840 and enjoyed a productive decade before giving up practice for the sake of his health. Although his churches differ externally, including examples in Romanesque style and the Decorated Gothic of Sutton Waldron, there is a notable affinity among interior spaces where the nave columns and capitals belong to a simplified late-Georgian tradition. The unadorned capitals at Holy Trinity, Ramsgate (1845), Kent, and St Mary’s, Motcombe, are frank in their plainness. The same lack of architectural sculpture at St Bartholomew’s gave Jones a blank canvas for his two-dimensional patterns; his skill in exploiting the moulded forms of the chancel arch belies its inherent simplicity.

The big question has always been how Jones came to be involved. The two architects clearly knew each other; they were the same age, moved in the same circles and, in the early 1840s, lived one street apart in the terraced houses of London’s Adelphi, the now lost neo-Classical development by the Adam brothers of 1768–72. Jones and Alexander also shared an interest in Islamic and Ancient Egyptian architecture, which was unusual enough to bring them together. After completing his training, Jones spent three years abroad. He was fascinated by remnants of coloured decoration on ancient Athenian monuments and continued to record the presence of polychromy when he joined pioneering Egyptologists exploring along the Nile in 1832–33. Far less is known about Alexander’s foreign adventures, but, in 1837, he exhibited, at the Royal Academy, a sketch drawn in Egypt and four years later contributed information about the architecture of Cairo to a meeting of the RIBA.

Jones journeyed on from Egypt to Istanbul. In 1834, his final destination was in Granada, Spain, and the 14th-century Alhambra palace. During a six-month stay there, Jones, with his French companion Jules Goury, accurately surveyed the Moorish building, detailing the extent of surviving decoration and revealing historic paint colours beneath layers of whitewash. This research was the basis for the two-volume Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, published in 1836–45. It remains a seminal work in the Western appreciation of Islamic design and the first name in the list of subscribers that begins every copy is that of Alexander. There can be no doubt Alexander knew and understood Jones’s preference for primary colours when he commissioned him to work on St Bartholomew’s. Importantly, Jones had detected a system behind the Alhambra colouring that he believed could be applied to other buildings and, at Sutton Waldron, Alexander gave him an opportunity to try it out.

Jones’s goal, here and in the Crystal Palace, was to create an overall harmony by combining blue, red and yellow in the relative proportions of eight, five and three discovered through the experiments of contemporary chemist George Field (Fig 8). Blue is the dominant colour in the nave at St Bartholomew’s, the pale tone of the walls accented by what might almost be called Jones’s signature sky blue on the arches and capitals (Fig 3); the same shade appears repeatedly in his later designs for interiors, wallpaper and stationery products. A very similar blue is also depicted in views of the Great Exhibition hall.

The full impact of the red is reserved for the chancel, where the red walls focus attention towards the altar. At the Crystal Palace, Jones achieved the same effect by adding red fabric hangings to break up the vast interior space into individual courts and create backdrops for the objects being exhibited. In both buildings, the yellow, which at St Bartholomew’s has become gold, is a highlight colour.

Jones would later formalise his views on form and colour into a series of 37 ‘Propositions’ to preface The Grammar of Ornament. The painting of the trefoils on the stone altar rail at Sutton Waldron exemplifies Proposition 21: ‘In using the primary colours on moulded surfaces, we should place blue, which retires, on the concave surfaces; yellow, which advances, on the convex; and red, the intermediate colour, on the undersides; separating the colours by white on the vertical planes.’

The nave and chancel are unified by Biblical texts stencilled in decorative borders (Fig 4). These were probably specified by the Revd Huxtable who was an active supporter of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and made all seats at Sutton Waldron free; there were no paid-for pews. The Sherborne Mercury states that the inscriptions were painted by Mr Henville of Blandford, but it is tempting to suggest he was following the designs of Jones, especially in the most decorative capital letters, which have a kindred feeling with printed works Jones was producing in the 1840s.

To achieve the quality of colour plates he wanted for his Alhambra volumes, Jones pioneered the technique of chromolithography and set up his own presses, which he then used to create a new form of illustrated gift book for publishers, such as John Murray and Longman. The stylised border around the Agnus Dei on the St Batholomew’s pulpit is particularly noteworthy in this regard for its similarity to Jones’s decorative work in J. G. Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads of 1842. Other repeating patterns in the church, stencilled in blue or blue and red (Fig 6), are so in tune with Jones’s preference for stylised natural forms and his belief that ‘All ornament should be based upon a geometrical construction’ that they could really be by no one else.

The predominance of primary colours extends to the chancel floor laid in rich patterns of Minton encaustic tiles (Fig 7). These feature an unusual amount of blue, which, as the most expensive colour to produce, was usually employed sparingly. Jones may have had a hand here, having previously worked with Minton, but Alexander had already used the firm’s tiles at St John’s, Notting Hill, so it is hard to be certain. The east window, representing the Saviour and the four Evangelists, was by Hudson of London and the rest of the stained glass was crafted by James Powell & Sons. The Sherborne Mercury was impressed: ‘The useful is blended with the beautiful throughout all the arrange-ments, and so completely do they harmonize that the one does not appear subservient to the other. Nothing is superfluous, nothing required; it is complete and unique in itself; and we feel that we shall not exceed the truth in saying it is the most beautiful village church in the diocese.’

Changes in fashion led to much of Jones’s chancel decoration being painted over in the 1920s, but sufficient survived for the 1972 Dorset Pevsner to recognise St Bartho-lomew’s as ‘probably the most important surviving scheme of this pioneer of High Victorian design’. The full extent was uncovered in the 1980s and 1990s then, last year, the church was closed for a National Heritage Lottery Fund programme of repair work by Opus Conservation. It is now a glory to behold, an amazingly complete and vivid interior that deserves all the care its current congregation have given it.

See more about the church and its service times at the Iwerne Valley Benefice website. With special thanks to Roderick Swift and Ian Pinder.

This feature originally appeared in the May 20, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Parts of Britain are being covered in ‘identikit identical houses’ that appear to have been ‘ordered by an algorithm’ and enabled by an increasingly centralised planning system and the growing influence of a construction industry that wields extraordinary power, according to Simon Jenkins.

The broadcaster, author and erstwhile Country Life staffer told the audience in his keynote address to the Future Countryside conference at Raby Castle, Co Durham, last week that the build obsession in Britain for ‘houses, houses, houses’ had nothing to do with homelessness, but everything to do with the arbitrary statistic of 1.5 million homes — ‘which we’re not going to reach anyway’ — and a building industry intent on making money.

Local authorities have become ‘mere agencies of central government direction’, targets can be imposed on local villages and towns with impunity and ‘that imposition is, to me, the biggest single threat we face at the moment’.

He cited the example of Moreton-in-Marsh, a once lovely Cotswold town that ‘is now an absolute disgrace’, having been ‘destroyed by a surrounding siege mob of Persimmon and Barratt homes.

‘You drive across the Somerset Levels, you drive across Essex, Kent… the south Midlands, parts of the Welsh borders and there are ugly housing estates,' he added. 'These are not houses for the poor. They are houses built by the private sector for the middling rich.’

The millennium was a watershed, when polls showed the British people loved only the Royal Family and the NHS more than the countryside. As long ago as the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, people felt rural areas should be protected and this had continued through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. ‘There was a general agreement that the countryside was something worth protecting… There was no great battle running then, except a battle to move slowly forward every year, [but] something... dissolved at the turn of the century.’

This consensus began to unravel during the Blair years as the construction lobby grew in influence and ‘wanted the Government to do what they wanted, and they were very, very effective. Most of the money going to the Conservative party [then] was coming from the construction industry, and the result [was that]… by the time of the Cameron government, you had a real sense that the game was up’.

The former chair of the National Trust added that he regards NIMBYs (an acronym for ‘Not in my back yard’, people who oppose developments) as ‘heroes of our age... At least somebody is trying to defend the countryside’.

To reverse the trend, he argued that although there will always be competing demands, the countryside has ‘to work for our advantage, but that working has got to be the result of a conversation in which the quality of the countryside must be dominant’.

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Derbyshire land on which Drakelow Hall once stood has a long-standing association with terrifying, fire-breathing monsters. It was first recorded as Dracan Hlawe, in the year 942AD, and its ancient English name translates to 'Dragon’s Mound', indicating a burial place with a guardian spirit.

The land was gifted to the Gresley family in the time of William the Conqueror, and remained in their care through the reign of more than 30 monarchs — a record unsurpassed by any other European dynasty. Perhaps they had some help from a mythical beast lurking somewhere underneath.

A Country Life article, published in 1907 noted, incredulously, that, ‘A Gresley was in arms against Henry III and yet did not lose Drakelowe utterly; another rode against Charles I, and the Drakelowe family was undisturbed by the Restoration. In the long line of Gresleys there must have been plotters and gamesters, men of wasteful fancies and lovers of change — a long pedigree never fails to record such — but Drakelowe remains unforfeited, unsold and unbartered.'

The magazine visited Drakelow a total of three times in the early 20th century. Blanketed by creepers, the romantic building, which dated back to the 16th century, boasted multiple chimneys and a castellated south facade. Inside, its most striking feature was the dining room, which was wrapped in a floor-to-ceiling fresco of a landscape, designed to trick the diner into believing they were outside.

The artist was Paul Sandby, a founding member of the Royal Academy, and he incorporated into his masterpiece scenes of north Wales and a chimneypiece decorated with crystals and seashells, to represent a grotto. The room's doors were cleverly incorporated into the painted design.

The Gresley dragon finally ran out of puff in the 1930s with the First World War and subsequent depression taking its toll on the family's fortunes. On August 8, 1931, Country Life reported on the sale of Drakelow's contents: 17th-century oak court cupboards; an Adam mahogany sideboard; fine Belgian tapestries; portraits of ancestors by notable artists, and George II, George III and William III ancestral silverware.

In 1933, Drakelow itself, along with more than 700 acres, appeared on the market. The Automobile Racing Association announced plans to purchase the house and turn it into a country club, and install two three- and eight-mile-long race tracks which would make it possible to legally host international races in England for the first time.

The plans quickly burnt out and by 1934, Drakelow was back on the market. It was snapped up by brewery director Clifford Gothard, who waited all of four years before demolishing it, citing soaring repair costs.

By 1955, Drakelow A Power Station had risen from the Elizabethan mansion's ashes, followed, in time, by Drakelow B and C. The power station's time standing was considerably shorter than the house from which they took their name with the first one closing in 1984. Until 2006, six massive cooling towers loomed overhead, until they, too, were bought crashing down. Today, half the site is occupied by about 2,100 homes, the other half by an energy-from-waste facility.

A few parts of Drakelow Hall, survive, somehow, to this day. A sunken garden, gate piers, stable blocks and cottages all enjoy listed status. And one wall from Sandby’s fantastical fresco made it’s way to the the V&A Museum, where it can be seen on display in their very 21st century East Storehouse. So far, there have been no reports of dragons in the vicinity.

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In the summer of 1678, Michael Malet was incarcerated in the Tower of London by Charles II for ‘mad, extravagant words’ uttered during a Parliamentary by-election in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Malet was twice elected as MP for Milborne Port, Somerset, close to his seat at Poyntington, Dorset, and his fanatical denunciations of the Court and popery earned him notoriety. In 1675, he had not only introduced a bill that aimed to legalise bigamy — probably in an attempt to allow Charles II to father a Protestant heir by one of his many mistresses — but he had shouted at the King’s brother, the future James II, a Catholic, to abandon ‘idolatry’ in the Queen’s drawing room.

One of those who was involved in managing the prosecution of Malet was the recently appointed Recorder of Abingdon, Thomas Medlycott. He was the son of a London dyer who had trained in the law and, as we shall see, Malet’s prosecution evidently connected him directly with Milborne Port and the families vying for control of its two Parliamentary seats. It also drew him directly into the infighting between the emerging factions of Whigs and Tories in national politics.

In Abingdon, Medlycott went on to oppose the manipulation of a mayoral election and then, in 1686, having been briefly dismissed from office as Recorder, he successfully defended a large group of dissenters in Berkshire from prosecution and taunted one of the Tory judges presiding over the case.

Given the political sympathies that these actions imply, it is no surprise that he was a firm supporter of the Glorious Revolution that overthrew James II in 1688. So much so that William of Orange actually stayed at his Abingdon home, Unicorn House, on his march from Exeter to London. Medlycott was subsequently elected to the convention — later declared to be a Parliament — that legitimised William’s succession with Queen Mary to the throne. His career as an Abingdon MP, however, proved very short lived. On May 7, 1689, the result of his election was overturned on account of the violence that accompanied the poll. He did not stand again, possibly because of his age — he was 61 — and retired from public life.

In the meantime, however, Medlycott had clearly been laying plans for his two eldest sons, James and Thomas. Both trained in the law and, until 1689, it is likely that the former was intended to enter into his father’s interests in Abingdon. Provision for his second son seems to have been organised by 1683, when Thomas was 21. This took the form of a mortgage on the estate of a Tory army officer, Sir Charles Carteret, in Somer-set. It cannot be a coincidence that this estate, which included the future site of Ven House, was close to Milborne Port and that Carteret repeatedly secured election in the borough as an MP from 1690–98. In some way, impossible now to discern, the prosecution of Malet must lie behind this connection.

During the 1690s, the younger Thomas began to enjoy a successful career in Ireland as secretary to the 2nd Duke of Ormonde, from whom he received property in 1698/99. That probably explains why, in 1698, James purchased Carteret’s mortgaged estate in Somerset. He occupied a house called Ven Farm on the edge of the town as his seat, but his work remained focused in London. Meanwhile, his younger brother — who comes across as more active and ambitious — managed his associated voting interest in the costly, fractious and hard-fought elections that were now central to English political life. In 1702, Thomas petitioned on behalf of James against the result of one election with far-reaching consequences.

Despite its diminutive size, Milborne Port returned two MPs. As was true across England, these were elected according to local traditions rather than a universal system. Thomas’s complaint established that, to avoid ‘disturbances’, all the inhabitants of Milborne Port not in receipt of alms had in recent years been allowed to vote. It was agreed, however, that only the votes of those paying scot and lot — a tax; hence the expression ‘scot free’ — in the nine bailiwicks of the town were actually eligible voters. At a stroke, the electorate shrank from about 80 to 48. With four of the bailiwicks under his ownership, James now established a controlling interest in elections and Milborne Port became almost — dependent on political alliances — a ‘pocket’ borough.

Consequently, in 1706, Thomas was returned as one of the borough MPs and, in 1710, James took his place. Then, on December 13, 1716, their 88-year-old father died and was buried at Milborne Port. James was nearly 60 by this date and it may have been in response to his inheritance that he both resigned his seat as MP and sold the lucrative office of Master in Chancery, which he had secured in 1706, for the enormous sum of £3,000. It was probably at this moment that James first contemplated a much grander residence at Milborne Port as an expression of his local standing and electoral authority.

The only documentary evidence for the construction of Ven House (Fig 1), which James subsequently began immediately adjacent to Ven Farm, is an undated — and until recently, misinterpreted — summary building account in the Medlycott family papers held in the Somerset Record Office. This cites the total cost of the new house as £2,493 4s 4d, with the lead, freestone and some timber being provided at James’s cost. Included in this total were £467 10s for 550,000 bricks, as well as £27 10s for their carriage, £334 12s for timber — variously brought from nearby Brewham Forest, Motcombe, and the estate — £99 15s for sash windows and their glass and 6,402ft of stone from ‘Doughthill’ (possibly Doulting) and Chariton. Crucially, the account also mentions the name of the chief contractor and presumed designer of the house, ‘Mr Ireson’.

This must be a reference to Nathaniel Ireson. Born in 1686, Ireson was apprenticed to the famously reliable builder Francis Smith of Warwick and, over the course of a long career, proved extraordinarily versatile, working variously as an architect, sculptor, builder, brick-maker, plasterer, quarryowner and potter. He is first documented in the South-West in 1720, when he was contracted by the banker Henry Hoare to realise Colen Campbell’s designs for Stourhead House, Wiltshire. Indeed, he cannot realistic-ally have been involved at Ven before this date. When exactly work began on the house, however, is not clear and was presumably determined by James’s troubled finances.

According to tradition, James was caught in the financial collapse of the South Sea Bubble late in 1720. If that’s true, and his fortune suffered, the contract with Ireson may have been drawn up just beforehand early in the same year. Alternatively, it may have been signed in about 1725, shortly before the contested elections of 1727 and 1728, when his brother Thomas was once again returned as an MP for Milborne Port.

Whatever the case, James somehow over-stretched himself and, in April 1731, was declared bankrupt. He died almost immediately afterwards, on May 2. By this date, the house must have been largely complete.

Regular and compactly arranged, Ven looks back to the architectural fashions of the 1690s and is laid out on a rectangular plan and built of brick, an unusual material for this region in the period (but well known to Ireson). It comprises a basement, two main floors and an attic storey. The basement to the rear is concealed by a garden terrace that originally terminated to each end in a freestanding banqueting house. Covering the whole structure is a low-pitched roof, which is concealed behind a balustrade.

The front and rear elevations are seven window bays wide and richly detailed in stone. Both were almost identically treated with a central doorcase and a giant order of Corinthian pilasters creating an emphatic tripartite division. Ireson created a similar design at Crowcombe Court in the north of Somerset, where he worked from 1724. At Ven, a heavy cornice incorporates the keystones of the windows to the upper floor, an unusual technical detail. Above, each attic bay is articulated by a single pilaster. The side elevations are entirely brick built and respectively five and six window bays, an idiosyncratic asymmetry in such a regular building.

As originally designed, the front door opened into a two-storey hall flanked by a pair of monumental fireplaces, each decorated with the Medlycotts’ eagle crest (Fig 3). Leading off the hall to each side were a ser-vants’ stair and the principal polite rooms of the house. Of these, the dining room with its fluted Doric pilasters and panelling is today the best preserved (Fig 4). At the far end of the hall, beneath the curving screen that dominates the interior, were three openings to the main stair. This had two flights of steps that swept back to the gallery over the hall screen through three upper arches. The gallery in turn gave access to the bedrooms on the first floor. The services occupied the basement and the attic storey of the house was presumably intended for servants.

The newly completed house and its setting are recorded in three remarkable drawings. Two are signed by a certain Richard Grange, of whom nothing is known. These show the house and the formal layout of the garden from the front and back. The third is dated 1739 and shows the wider grounds, some features of which are still preserved in the present garden layout (Country Life, March 29, 2023). By this date Ven was in the hands of James’s son, another Thomas, who briefly competed with his uncle Thomas for control of the parliamentary seat.

In 1763, the property passed from this third Thomas to a nephew, Thomas Hutchings, who then assumed the name of Medlycott. He was succeeded by his son William Coles, who was elevated to a baronetcy in 1808 in return for his political support. Upon inheriting the estate in 1835, and following the Reform Act of 1832 that swept away the electoral arrangements that had served the family for more than a century, his son and namesake commissioned the established London architect Decimus Burton to renovate the house. Burton is familiar as a Greek Revival practioner, but at Ven he entered to a quite remarkable degree into the spirit of this 1720s building. A full series of his drawings for the work survives.

Internally, Burton closed the lower openings between the hall and the main stair and divided up the latter space to create a new drawing room (Fig 5). At the same time, he recast the servants’ stair as the principal stair (Fig 2). Externally, Burton recycled the front door within a new, projecting porch (Fig 7) and reconfigured the wider setting of the building. Meanwhile, the banqueting houses were demolished and a new conservatory and glazed passage were added across part of the terrace (Fig 6). To either side of the building, he also created courts for stables and other services, each entered through a triumphal arch.

Sir William Coles Medlycott Jnr was succeeded by four sons, the last of whom died in 1920. By this date, the first parts of the estate were already being sold off and the house was subsequently let. An advertisement in Country Life in 1928 described it as possessing a ‘large hall, four reception rooms, billiard room, sixteen bedrooms, bathrooms, lavatories, very complete domestic offices and servants’ quarters, electric light, central heating, luggage lift, stabling [for] ten horses [and] garages’.

Ven House was eventually sold in 1957, however, and has since passed through the hands of several owners. These have included the American collector Tommy Kyle, a serial restorer of country houses, and the designer Jasper Conran. In 2015, the house was bought by the present owner Mike Fisher, the founder of the architecture and interior design firm Studio Indigo, and his partner, Charles, Lord Allen of Kensington. They undertook further restoration work with the help of B2 Architects and have furnished the interior with a combination of historic and modern furnishings to stylish effect (Fig 8). Under their care, and with its outstanding gardens, Ven answers the popular ideal of what an English country house should be.

This feature originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Ardenrun Place, in Surrey, did not live a long life, but did, at least enjoy a riotous, Gatsby-esque few years for the time it was around.

In the September 17, 1921, issue, Country Life run an article about the modern mansion's surprising sale. Built by Ernest Newton in 1905 for Hans Henry Konig and featured in the magazine's architectural section in 1911, Ardenrun had failed to sell at auction in 1919.

Konig was a confirmed bachelor who made his considerable fortune as a banker, in London and New York. His pennies paid for Ardenrun — in which he installed electricity, central heating and a telephone — as well as 1,000 acres, a working farm, golf course and stables.

Rather than restrict himself to one architectural style, Konig commissioned an Adam-style breakfast room, a Georgian-style dining room (complete with Wedgwood friezes), and a Louis XVI-style tapestry room, orangery and an elegant billiard room. There were also marble floors, carved Portland stone features, plasterwork ceilings and an unpolished Italian walnut staircase with intricate limewood carvings in the style of Grinling Gibbons.

Konig enjoyed a decade in his new-build palace, but, in 1919, his poor health dictated a move to the South of France. Even in the wake of the First World War, it was presumed that Ardenrun would sell quickly, but two years went by before swashbuckling racing driver Captain Woolf Barnato stepped in to save the day.

Barnarto stood at an imposing six feet — several inches taller than the average British man in the first half of the 21st century, and still tall for a driver — and had inherited his father’s gold and diamond mining fortune. He served in the War, including at Ypres, and, afterwards, dedicated his time to having fun.

The Champagne-swilling, fun-loving man soon instilled the spirit of the jazz age in Ardenrun. In 1923, newly-divorced from his American first wife, Dorothy, he installed a mock-Tudor pub in the basement called the Ardenrun Arms — and developed a reputation for lavish parties. (He once entertained the Australian cricket team, including Don Bradman.)

A talented sportsman, Barnarto kept wicket for Surrey, boxed, played tennis to a 'country house standard' and had a love of racing power boats. However, he reserved his strongest affections for anything on four wheels. Soon after purchasing Ardenrun, Barnato bought his first Bentley. Twelve months later, he purchased a controlling share in the company itself.

The leader of the glamorous Bentley Boys (a group of wealthy British motorists who drove Bentley sports cars to victory in the 1920s), Barnarto achieved three consecutive wins out of three entries in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race — a perfect record which stands to this day. He also staged time trials in the grounds of Ardenrun, including alongside his good friend, Ettore Bugatti.

Barnarto's desire to win wasn’t just confined to sports. On March 28, 1932, The Pittsburgh Press reported that San Franciscan society beauty Jacqueline Quealey was bombarded by radiograms from a desperately in love Barnato. His persistence and charm paid off. She agreed to marry the fast-living, fun-loving sportsman, and upped sticks from California to Surrey.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 17, 1933, a fire was discovered in the nursery at the very top of the house. Despite the efforts of three fire brigades, little could be done to stop is spreading. Furniture and other valuables were carried out by staff and a dressing-gown-clad Barnato and two wings saved, but the main body of the house and fine staircase were reduced to ashes.

Barnato and his new, pregnant wife, San Franciscan society beauty Jacqueline Quealey, moved to a hotel in London (Jacqueline gave birth to a son the following month) and then to Grosvenor Square, where they lived until a new house, named Ridgemead in Englefield Green, Surrey, was built for them by Robert Lutyens.

As for Ardenrun? It were abandoned. Like Gatsby, it couldn’t live forever.

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In different corners of the cathedral close at Gloucester are two very different buildings linked by a common thread of occupation. One, in the shadow of the cathedral, is an outstanding medieval residence on the grand scale with a history stretching back to the 12th century. The other is a handsome Georgian house of about 1740, brick built with a regular grid of windows and a pedimented central doorcase. They have served consecutively as the official home of the Dean of Gloucester and, in combination, illustrate the story of the cathedral close and its architectural evolution over the past 900 years.

By royal charter dated September 3, 1541, Henry VIII made Gloucester a city and reconstituted its ancient abbey of St Peter — suppressed in January the previous year — as a cathedral. Henceforth, the church of the Bishop of Gloucester would be served not by monks, but a ruling dean and a community of six senior clergy termed canons, six minor canons and a choir of six lay clerks, one master of choristers and eight choristers. There were to be two masters of grammar, to instruct the choir boys, as well as a professional staff of two under sacrists, two doorkeepers, who would also act as ‘virgers’, a butler, a cook, and an under cook.

This transformation from Benedictine abbey to cathedral college marked a decisive moment of change at Gloucester and the accompanying rededication of the church — from St Peter to the Holy Trinity — underlined Henry VIII’s rejection of Papal authority. It was accompanied, however, by some important continuities. Not only were some former monks granted places in the new community, but the monastic buildings passed intact to the new foundation. These included the church, one of the formative masterpieces of English late-medieval architecture — and world-famous thanks to its starring role in several Harry Potter films — as well as the wider monastic precinct.

The Rule of St Benedict observed by the monks of St Peter’s describes a communal religious life. It was to accommodate this that in the 11th century, Serlo, first Norman abbot of Gloucester, created the architectural bones of the late-medieval monastery. He laid the foundation stone for a monumental new church on June 29, 1089, the architectural centrepiece of a new monastic complex. This was organised, as was conventional, around a cloister with a refectory, dormitory and chapter house respectively for the monks to eat, sleep and meet in common.

As part of this project, Serlo, or one of his immediate successors, also began a residence for the abbot adjacent to the west front of the church nave. This took the form of a three-storey tower. Set in the space between the tower and the nave was a porch, the main entrance to the cloister, with the abbot’s chapel above it. The abbot’s tower overlooked the outer court of the monastic precinct. This, the Great Court, was connected by a gatehouse to the quays on the River Severn, long the source of Gloucester’s prosperity. Filled with service and subsidiary buildings, including the abbey mill, it was the working area of the monastery and the main entrance to it.

Abbots in great medieval monasteries such as Gloucester often occupied independent residences. Not only, as powerful magnates, did they maintain large households, but they had to engage in business that could distract from the monastic round of prayer. During the later Middle Ages, however, other senior monks within the community also left the dormitory and began to live with a degree of independence. This move was partly a product of rising expectations of domestic comfort and privacy in society at large; standards of living among the wealthy and educated, be they lay or clerical, broadly matching one another.

In addition, however, the change was encouraged by the way in which monasteries were being administered. From the 13th century, it became common to assign estates from within the landed endowment of the monastery to the officers appointed by the abbot. The intention was that these so-called obedientiaries — such as the cellarer, responsible for provisions, or the sacristan, charged with the management of the liturgy — would use the estate revenue to discharge their duties. In the process, they came to enjoy independent incomes and might take up residence in the service buildings for which they had responsibility. The very richest might build country houses on the estates they managed.

At Gloucester, in about 1330, the abbot built a new courtyard residence in the northern corner of the Great Court. His deputy, the prior, then moved into the abbot’s former lodging. By this date, the original tower had been elaborately re-fronted in the 13th century (Fig 1) and linked to two additional ranges by means of a stair turret. These two ranges stand at right angles to one another and have been much adapted over time.

The larger of the two has been known since at least the mid 17th century as the Parliament Chamber and was possibly the hall used for a meeting of parliament at Gloucester in 1378. For the duration of the parliament, the chronicler of Gloucester complained of intense overcrowding and the trampling of greenery in the cloister by ball games and wrestling. One architectural curiosity it contains is a fireplace overmantel traced with the lines of mouldings. This seems to be a recycled fragment of a floor on which a medieval mason drew up architectural designs, a very rare survival.

Under the occupation of the prior, the lodging underwent one more important change. In 1422, the church was slightly shortened and its west front rebuilt. As part of this project, the adjacent chapel and cloister porch beneath it were also trimmed back. Then, the whole façade was reworked as we see it today beneath two gables, the larger corresponding to the 12th-century abbot’s tower (as refronted in the 13th century) and the smaller to the chapel and doorway to the cloister porch.

As part of this work, some new window tracery and detailing was inserted into the building, as, for example, the new chapel window and the spectacular door beneath it. More surprising, however, is the appearance within both gables of zig-zag mouldings, which must be recycled from the Romanesque fabric. It’s a peculiarity of the late-medieval architecture at Gloucester, as, for example, in the 1330s south transept of the church, that it makes decorative use of Romanesque detailing in this way. Was the monastery consciously trying to advertise its deep history?

In 1541, the cathedral community took up residence within the existing precinct in a way that demanded a minimum of physical change. The new Bishop of Gloucester took possession of the abbot’s lodging and the first Dean — William Jennings, who had previously been prior of the immediately adjacent monastery of St Oswald in Gloucester — the prior’s lodging. It would serve his successor deans for the next four centuries. Meanwhile, it’s likely that the canons — who were expected to live independently — occupied the houses used by the obedientiaries. The communal refectory and dormitory were then demolished.

Of the development of the Deanery little can now be said with confidence because it underwent wholesale restoration in the late 19th century. As described in The Builder of June 30, 1863, the work was directed by ‘Messrs. Fulljames & Waller, and… their clerk of the works, Mr. Ashbee’. The report continues ‘the whole of the building has been almost gutted to remove the monstrosities which have been gradually accumulating… Gothic doorways, Norman windows, columns, capitals, and passages are constantly peeping out… Here is a perfect galaxy of architecture’.

By stripping back the fabric, much was revealed about the medieval interiors, including a built-in medieval lamp on the stairs. What was lost in the process was any sense of how the building had evolved over time. What does survive, however, is a magnificent panelled interior named after perhaps the most famous Dean of Gloucester, William Laud. A portrait of the future and controversial Archbishop of Canterbury presides over the interior (Fig 2). How far this room is a product of 19th-century antiquarian taste is impossible to say, but the panelling is historic and presumably comes from the building.

In 1940, the Dean moved out of the Deanery, which has since served as offices, and took up residence in a Georgian house overlooking Miller’s Green. This attractive green space within the monastic precinct was formerly the site of the abbey mill. The house is a symmetrical brick box, five window bays wide and three storeys high (Fig 4). It is enclosed to the front by a railing and massive brick piers topped by urns. The central front door is set in a shallow projection that rises to the parapets and the main front is framed to the sides by shallow pilasters.

It’s clear from surviving leases that the present house occupies a site that was divided up by 1700 into several smallholdings. An engraving of the cathedral published in 1712 shows the associated houses hugging the precinct wall in what is now the Dean’s back garden. It is not known who cleared these structures or who built the present house, but it was in existence by 1741, when it was leased to a certain ‘Peter Haynes gent’. He was probably the son of another Peter Haynes, a grocer of Gloucester, who was prominent in the affairs of the town from the 1670s. If this identification is correct, Haynes clearly hoped to advance himself socially by leasing the house. His use of the title ‘gentleman’ may reflect his purchase of a nearby estate at Tibberton. If he was trying to advance himself, however, the effort came to nothing; his son died young and Tibberton passed to his daughter, who sold it. Whatever the case, it’s very unlikely that Haynes had anything to do with the design or form of the building in the close, which looks as if it was created by a local builder to a high standard.

The front door opens into a large hall that runs through the full depth of the house to the main stair (Fig 3). This is framed at the far end of the room by a broad arch. Immediately to the left of the hall is the dining room (Fig 7). According to the Historic England listing description, its Georgian panelling and fireplace were installed here in about 1935, but it’s not clear where they came from. The drawing room (Fig 6), with views over the garden, opens off the opposite corner of the hall and displays an early-18th-century view of the close showing the Old Deanery. Both rooms are used by the present Dean, the Very Revd Andrew Zihni, for cathedral business and entertaining.

The main stair rises to an upper landing that corresponds in size to the hall (Fig 5). Again, it opens into a series of attractively proportioned rooms, which creates a private apartment within the house. The details of doors and fireplaces suggest that the interior was re-fitted in the early 19th century. This would also account for the fact that the windows of the upstairs sitting room have clearly been enlarged and fixed with ironwork balconies.

A neatly contrived service stair opens off the upper landing and gives access to the upper floor. As illustrated here, the rooms show decorative changes made by the partner of the present Dean, Lloyd Wood, an interior designer, to make this building both comfortable as a home and functional as an important working building within the cathedral close.

See more at the Gloucester Cathedral website.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Cosmo and Bronya Linzee Gordon sit at a rare surviving example of a house organ that occupies the first-floor landing of Cluny Castle.

Its ranks of brilliantly painted pipes were decorated by the Scottish artist and designer Daniel Cottier. The fine bench is contemporary with the organ and a small plaque above the console is inscribed with the name of the maker, Forster and Andrews of Hull, East Yorkshire.

This leading company, which operated from 1843 until 1956, made instruments as far afield as Australia and South America and, in 1911, built the 6,000-pipe Hull City Hall organ.

The Cluny instrument was installed in 1873 as part of the wholesale remodelling of the interiors by John Gordon and his second wife, Emily Eliza Steele, née Pringle.

In 1858, Gordon had inherited a vast fortune from his father, also John, who had remodelled the castle on an extravagant scale from 1824.

Cosmo comments: ‘Dating from a time when organs were still far from universal in Scottish Presbyterian worship, it is a wonderful and rather unexpected piece of Victorian craftsmanship and imagination, and remains largely intact and playable. The pedal bass also has the added domestic distinction of being quite capable of waking the entire household, sounding rather like a foghorn reverberating through the halls and corridors.’

Visit the Cluny Castle website for more information.

This feature originally appeared in the May 20, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Glin Castle stands upright and alert on the banks of the Shannon, one of the few historic country houses in Co Limerick that is still in the ownership of the family that built it. Desmond Guinness, founder of the Irish Georgian Society, wrote of the house: ‘There is something rather unreal about Glin; it looks like a toy cut from cardboard, and the illusion is only heightened by the little battlemented lodges, resembling castles in a game of chess, that protect the demesne.’

It may have the air of a toy castle, but, as we discovered in the last article, it has a deep and remarkable history. The current chatelaine’s father, Desmond FitzGerald, who died in 2011, was the 29th holder of the ancient Irish hereditary title of Knight of Glin. Now, his eldest daughter, the garden designer and horticulturist Catherine FitzGerald, has taken on the mantle of protector of Glin Castle with her husband, the actor Dominic West.

The presentation of the interiors of Glin closely reflects that devised by the 29th Knight of Glin when he returned to live in Ireland in 1975. He was a scholar and sophisticate, who worked for many years as a curator in the furniture department of the V&A Museum and became both Christie’s representative for Ireland and a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland. The preservation of the house dominated his later life. In this endeavour, he was supported by his wife, Olda, Madam FitzGerald, a gardener and author, who saw through the much-admired restoration of the long-abandoned walled garden.

He also became a tireless campaigner for Irish cultural heritage and that of the 18th century in particular. His contribution to scholarship gained impetus from the fact that he belonged to a seemingly vanishing tribe of Anglo-Irish landowners. A president of the Irish Georgian Society, and on the first board of the Irish Architectural Archive, FitzGerald was author of numerous books, including The Painters of Ireland c. 1600-1920 (1978) and Irish Furniture (2007), the latter with James Peill, with whom he later also collaborated on The Irish Country House (2010). He was a collector of Irish paintings, furniture and decorative arts — silver and ceramics were a great love — and the role of Glin Castle in shaping his tastes and instincts cannot be overestimated.

Robert O’Byrne’s biography, The Last Knight: A tribute to Desmond FitzGerald 29th Knight of Glin (2013), covers his life and career fully, but some account of his circumstances should be given here. Born in 1937, the years of his early life at Glin were difficult ones for many country-house owners in Ireland. He was 12 when his father died and his formidable mother, Veronica, threw herself into preserving her son’s inheritance, supported by her second husband, Canadian businessman Ray Milner.

Madam FitzGerald also installed several historic chimneypieces from lost historic Co Limerick houses, with two from Tervoe House (demolished in the 1950s) now installed in the dining and smoking rooms, and one from Ballywilliam in the library. The drawing-room chimneypiece was made by Pietro Bossi.

The Knight’s remote early childhood led him to read widely and school days at Stowe in Buckinghamshire — not entirely happy — reinforced his love of 18th-century architecture. He studied fine arts at the University of British Columbia in Canada and spent a year at the University of Malaya.

Given a place at Harvard in the US, he worked on a thesis about the Irish Palladians, which became the basis for numerous articles, but was never completed. He married Olda Willes in 1970 and they moved back to Ireland in 1975. There followed 40 years of legendary hospitality and collaborative work, keeping Glin Castle. The FitzGeralds’ children are garden designer Catherine, now chatelaine of Glin; Nesta, a well-known artist and illustrator based in Dublin, and Honor, recently returned from California to Ireland, where her husband runs an art gallery.

After his return, and for the next four decades, the Knight of Glin was at the centre of debates around Ireland’s 18th-century culture. Among his notable friends and collaborators, the Knight was close to pioneering conservationists Desmond and Mariga Guinness of Leixlip Castle; as well as to academics Anne Crookshank and Edward McParland of Trinity College Dublin; and to Maurice Craig, who worked for An Taisce, the Irish heritage body. His London circle included Peter Thornton, John and Eileen Harris, Christopher Gibbs, Mark Girouard and John Cornforth, the latter two writing memorable Country Life articles about Glin Castle (respectively, February 27 and March 5, 1964, and June 11, 1998). William Laffan also points to the numerous younger scholars whom he encouraged with hospitality and shared research.

FitzGerald was a regular contributor to Apollo and Country Life magazines and was behind the influential book Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland (1988) and accompanying exhibition in the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 1990, he succeeded Guinness as the chairman of the Irish Georgian Society, helping it settle into new Merrion Square offices in Dublin — first in No 42, then at No 74 — and spearheaded fundraising for the move to the City Assembly House. He also helped establish an influential new journal, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies.

Much of what is described above was the pro-bono side of his career, carried out on behalf of others. His principal work from the early 1970s was as Christie’s representative in Ireland. The role, he admitted, sometimes made him feel like a funeral director at great house sales. He also played an undeniable role in garnering interest from a new breed of Irish collectors; he further encouraged these collectors to bring important Irish 18th-century works back to historic Irish houses.

A considerable collector in his own right, there is an account of his collecting principles in Cornforth’s Country Life article on June 11, 1998: ‘It is an unusual collector’s house because it does not feel like one: Everything looks as though it has always been there, and the recent arrivals are at ease with the ancestors… Decoration on its own can create dead houses with objects that often only play a role of pattern-making, but at Glin everything has a reason for being there.’ Despite a major sale in 2009 — Glin Castle: A Knight in Ireland — held at Christie’s in London, the house still feels much as it did in his day; Ms FitzGerald explains that her father rehung the main collection personally, so it was done with his eye and knowledge of how the rooms should look. Except for some family silver, it was products of his more recent collecting that were sold.

For instance, the entrance hall features John Wilson’s portrait of the builder of the castle, John FitzGerald, 23rd Knight of Glin, in the uniform of a colonel of the Royal Glin Artillery (Fig 6), and another of his wife, Margaretta Maria. Above a side table with the arms of the Fitzmaurice family hangs a Herman van der Mijn portrait of Richard FitzGerald, the 22nd Knight, shown in the act of receiving a challenge to a duel (Fig 4). Facing this is a full-length portrait by Michael Wright of John, 1st Lord Kingston. There are also groups of skilled portrayals of racehorses painted by Lady Rachel FitzGerald.

By the door to the staircase is a fine portrait of an earlier Nesta FitzGerald by Norwegian artist Christian Meyer Ross, painted in 1882 when she was on honeymoon in Rome. The wooden lantern by Detmar Blow was copied from a Venetian Renaissance example; one of a set made for the Gallery at Adare Manor, Co Limerick, home of the Dunraven family. The dining room’s deep-red walls feature portraits of former Knights, including John Fraunceis FitzGerald, 24th Knight of Glin, known locally as The Knight of the Women.

For a time, the FitzGeralds ran a successful small country-house hotel with manager Bob Duff, which spurred renovations of the unfinished top floor as en-suite bedrooms, but the 2008 recession led to its closure. This was a great blow and prompted the Christie’s sale referred to above. Madam FitzGerald valiantly kept things going during the ‘downturn’ that followed, but, in 2015, it seemed no longer possible to keep the castle going financially and it was put it on the market.

Fate played a hand and no buyer came forward. Ms FitzGerald and her husband, Mr West, then made the decision to take the house on, with the family remaining resident in the wing (Fig 7). This was formerly a range of service spaces and workshops, which was remodelled in part first for FitzGerald’s mother and then further converted by the Knight for the family’s occupation; it now includes a family kitchen (Fig 5) and, on the first floor, a handsome library/drawing room overlooking the gardens. The main house is run as an exclusive private-hire business, specialising in group stays, corporate retreats and events, with a long season seeing a constant flow of visitors — all expertly managed by Marie-Therese Costelloe. The outlook for Glin is secure for the first time in many years and there are projects to create further public walks through the demesne woodlands and restore the historic lodges.

The credit for all this goes to the current incumbents. Ms FitzGerald’s devotion to Glin Castle derives partly from growing up there and working on the garden in different periods of her life, but it has also shaped her work as a designer.

To the gardens established by her parents, she has added a new wildflower meadow and a broader range of planting, including a collection of magnolias, other flowering trees and acid-loving shrubs. Professionally, she trained at RHS Wisley in Surrey and worked for Arabella Lennox-Boyd, before her first independent project, for the Glenarm Castle walled garden, Co Antrim, which won the Historic Houses Garden of the year award in 2023.

Now, she works closely with Mark Lutyens, a landscape architect, as Lutyens and FitzGerald, such as on the five-year revival of the gardens of Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland, for Historic Royal Palaces, which included a reimagined walled garden, terraces and parterres around the house. She also co-founded the successful Festival of Gardens and Nature held annually at Ballintubbert, Co Laois.

The deep sense of place that Ms FitzGerald brings to her work has steered her care for the house. The colour schemes of Glin Castle have largely been preserved as her parents envisioned them, including the dark blue in the library, hand painted by their friend Mariga Guinness one summer in the 1960s (Fig 3). One major project has been the complete renovation of the drawing room — the window over-lintels had to be replaced and the walls stripped back and re-plastered. All this work was done by expert local craftsman Leo Healy, whose family worked on the house during the 19th and 20th centuries. The walls were painted a soft pink on the advice of David Mlinaric, an old family friend, and the plaster frieze and other mouldings, which were darkened with soot, were cleaned — lifting the spirit of the room. Pictures were rehung and old curtains removed entirely to allow more light in and reveal the beautiful Georgian bow windows, which look out to the Shannon estuary (Fig 1). A new carpet was introduced, together with comfortable upholstered furniture and modern textiles in the principal reception rooms (Fig 2).

The feel is that of a hospitable Irish country house, with the strong, artistic stamp of the FitzGerald family who gave it shape and maintain it still, to be enjoyed for the future both as a house and as a representative of the inherited property of an ancient Irish line.

Find out more at the Glin Castle website.

This feature originally appeared in the April 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There is a saying that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Rushbrooke Hall in Suffolk, while technically not a castle, boasted an impressive moat, and was associated with two of the country’s most famous monarchs: Elizabeth I and Charles I. Castle-worthy qualities, surely?

Described as an exceptionally beautiful, red brick building, with gables and turrets, Rushbrooke was built for Sir Robert Jermyn — grandfather to the Stuart courtier and visionary property developer Henry Jermyn, the 1st Earl of St Albans. (The Earl was responsible for the development of land to the north of St James’s Palace in London, including what we know today as the West End, Duke Street, and Jermyn Street.

Good Queen Bess graced Sir Robert with her presence not once, but twice, during her reign, holding court at Rushbrooke in 1577 during her summer progress through East Anglia.

Later, his grandson, Henry, was to go one step further in courting royalty, 'befriending' Henrietta Maria of France, the wife of Charles I. There were even scandalous rumours that Henry was Charles II's father. Whatever the truth of the matter, the relics sold at a sale of items from the hall in the early 20th century spoke to an exceptionally close relationship to both the Elizabethan and Caroline eras.

In 1903, Country Life's H. Avary Tipping and photographer Charles Latham visited Rushbrooke and reported it to be in rude health. Now in the possession of a Mr R. W. Jermyn Rushbrooke, the charming property had been vastly improved upon during the preceding centuries. There was a vast, Kentian double height hallway with a magnificent marble fireplace, held up by caryatids. The ornate wood and plasterwork chimneypiece was festooned with swags. And a vast oak staircase ferried visitors to the upper floors past a dizzying array of family portraits executed by the likes of Sir Peter Lely and van Dyck.

Tipping was enchanted, writing: ‘ It is one of those old mansions that seem to breathe the spirit of former times. We may even fancy we still hear there the footfall of the old cavalier and the rustle of his lady’s gown.'

Sadly, the First World War brought things to a rude halt. On the August 23, 1919, Rushbrooke and the associate village and farms, were put on the market, alongside a heartbreaking array of other estates around the country, now bereft of men and means. In fact, there were so many houses of good standing on the market that Rushbrooke only featured on the eighth page of the property supplement it was listed in.

Knight Frank, then Knight, Frank and Rutley, organised the sale of items from the hall in 1919. An Elizabethan four-poster bed in its original state fetched 850 guineas (more than £50,000 in today's money) and a van Dyck of Henry Jermyn realised 500 guineas. Bizarrely, Charles I's silk brocade suit only made 35 guineas, and his a clothes chest, 50 guineas.

In 1921, Rushbrooke's salvation arrived in the form of Lord and Lady Islington (he was a governor of New Zealand and served in the governments of both Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George; she was the granddaughter of Baron Napier of Magdala) — who showered it worth attention and care until Lord Islington's death in 1936, when it was purchased by Lord Rothschild.

He, in turn, lent it to the Red Cross in the Second World War, who used it as a convalescent home (the first in Suffolk).

After the war, Lord Rothschild had little use for the ageing home, but failed to find anyone willing to occupy it. By 1955, it was in dire need of about £50,000-worth of works (£1.6 million).

In October of the same year, it was reported that Lord Rothschild had offered numerous local councils any of the contents that they deemed suitable for their own use of preservation, but none of them took him up on the offer.

Unable to give away the treasures or to spend the required amount to make the building viable, Lord Rothschild had to agree to have the property demolished in 1961.

Rushbrooke Hall was placed in the hands of demolition contractors, but before they could wreak their own havoc, a fire ripped through the centuries-old hall, taking everything that remained with it. It was a tragic end to the one-time home of the man who created many of London's most impressive, and still standing, streets.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

You might recognise Chavenage House, in the heart of the south Cotswolds near Tetbury, from the small screen: it was one of the main filming locations for Poldark, and is now playing a leading role in the Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper's Rivals.

If you're a long-standing Country Life reader, however, it's probably been on your radar a lot longer than that. This fascinating home has been featured several times in the magazine, so as it appears on our screens once again we wanted to bring you one of those articles in its entirety.

The following is the piece written by architectural historian Nicholas Cooper for Country Life in 2003, together with pictures by Paul Barker from that same year — and a few from its first ever appearance in the magazine, back in 1911.

Chavenage House, two miles north-west of Tetbury, is both beautiful and puzzling. It is easy to like, and difficult to understand. Strange stories exist about things that did not happen, and a great deal of mystery about equally curious things that did. But the stories that collect round old houses sometimes seem as much a part of their history as such tangible things as the architecture and furnishings, and where so little is known, speculation is justified — indeed, inevitable.

The best-known tale is how Nathaniel Stephens — a leading Parliamentarian in the Civil War and a member of the Long Parliament — was keeping Christmas at Chavenage in 1648 when Henry Ireton arrived, hot foot from London, to urge Stephens to return with him to vote for the King's execution. They argued far into the night, and although warned by his sister of terrible things that would befall the family, in the end Stephens rode off with Ireton in the morning.

The following May, he is said to have sickened of an incurable illness; at his funeral a ghostly carriage appeared with a headless driver, and the guests watched in horror as the spectre of the dead man climbed into it and was borne away.

The story was either invented or elaborated in 1845 by a local clergyman who published it in a long poem. But the writer's respect for the truth may be guessed by his changing Nathaniel's name to Richard ('his father's appellation, and more suited to versification') and his sister's from Abigail to Rachel.

The facts are that Nathaniel did not die until 1660, declared himself fit and well when he made his will in 1658, never voted for the King's execution and spoke out against it. So it may not be true that he was whisked away by a headless coachman either, but it is a good tale.

The Stephens family's principal seat was at Eastington, near Stroud — a large, formal, Jacobean house, now vanished — and it seems likely that in the 17th century Chavenage was used as a dower house or by eldest sons before they inherited. It was described as 'that great farm house' in 1654, when Nathaniel Stephens settled it on his son Richard's new bride as her jointure, and when Richard died his will specified that his widow could continue to live at Eastington if she wished. It was only in the following century that the family made Chavenage (Fig 1) their regular home, and it is not clear why they left the grander house to decay and chose to live in the smaller one, unless it was simply for economy.

From 1732 to 1795, Chavenage House belonged to a succession of childless brothers, the last of whom, Henry Stephens, bequeathed it to a cousin, Henry Willis, on condition that he took the Stephens surname. But Henry Willis Stephens, who occupied the house from then until 1814, was convinced that his relations were trying to poison him. Disappearing from home without any farewells but having made over his estate to trustees, he reached Le Havre, where the British consul was alarmed both for his state of mind and — since Willis Stephens having taken £4,000 with him in bank notes — for his personal safety.

Thence he made his way via Lisbon to the Canary Islands, where he hoped that in a remote Dominican convent he would be safe. But even there he felt threatened; back in London by 1816, he wrote that 'even the Deserts of Teneriffe could not protect me from my Enemies, who invisibly pursue me — so unjustly — for Reasons entirely unknown to me.' He died, in 1821, in Paris.

By the terms of his will, the house passed to a niece, who married Maurice Fitzgerald Townshend, Rector of Thornbury. He changed his name to Townshend-Stephens. Unexpectedly inheriting the Townshends' Irish estates in 1845, their son preferred Ireland, and for most of the 19th century, Chavenage was let. The contents, which Henry Willis Stephens had intended to be retained as heirlooms, were dispersed in a sale; the house was sold in 1891 to George Hoole-Lowsley-Williams, whose mother had inherited land in Gloucestershire but lacked a house to go with it. David Lowsley-Williams, the house's present owner, is his grandson, and it is hard to believe that his family has not been here since the 16th century. [Editor's note, May 2026: David Lowsley-Williams died peacefully at Chavenage in 2023; his family still owns the property today.]

At first glance, Chavenage is the perfect picture of the Cotswold manor house, with its two-storeyed porch set between a pair of wings, the great hall clearly marked by its tall window, and the whole built of warm, golden-grey stone. But when one looks more closely, many of the details seem rather odd. The front door has a date of 1576 and a contemporary frieze, but over it is a window of the early 15th century and a fragment of a later tombstone. Elsewhere, there are some most curious windows, Gothic revival and re-invented Tudor.

The hall (Fig 2) has a splendid fireplace with Stephens arms on the over-mantel, screen and gallery with an 18th-century chamber organ, a flat ceiling, and an impressive doorway leading to the Oak Room beyond. But all is not what it seems. On close inspection, the screen is an opened-up partition, ornamented with decorative details from a wide variety of sources. The doorway opposite is also made up of a variety of elements, some of them probably Continental. The flat ceiling is not the original one, the stud-work of a shallow, plaster barrel vault remains over the gallery, and this may have extended over the entire hall. The chimneypiece is from about 1605, and was produced by the same local workshop as ones at Lasborough and at Bradford-on-Avon, but it is tempting to wonder whether it might have come from Eastington. However, it may always have been here.

Beyond that lies the grandest room in the house, the Oak Room (Fig 5), which has early-17th-century wainscot of high quality and a remarkable fireplace of the mid 16th, wholly Gothic save for two Renaissance brackets. Portrait roundels above it are typical of those imported from the Low Countries, and a sideboard recess is backed with grotesque Jacobean figures and a re-set panel with the date of 1627.

The whole ensemble has in fact been pieced together at an unknown date, and it is doubtful whether either the woodwork or the fireplace were in the house originally, but as in the hall the whole creates the most agreeable air of warmth and comfort. Again, one can only speculate about origins. Some of the panelling may be from Eastington, and since the Bristol area possesses some of the earliest surviving Renaissance work in the country, the fireplace probably comes from another local source.

The south-east wing contains the library (Fig 4) on the ground floor, an addition of unknown date and with a pretty Rococo fireplace at the north end. A wing to the south contains the billiard room, with an 18th-century coved ceiling and another fireplace of the same type as the one in the hall; thickly painted, its date is difficult to establish, but it is likely to be a genuine piece, removed from elsewhere. Two windows light the billiard room, one an imported window of the early 15th century and the other a Gothic-style bay of about 1800.

An 18th-century stair leads to two bedrooms above the library, close hung with tapestry. One, known as Cromwell's room (Fig 9), has a Georgian chimneypiece, the other, Ireton's Room, a Victorian one. Throughout the house, windows are glazed with a fine array of panels and fragments, English and Continental, of the 14th to 18th centuries.

These rooms, with their odd windows, look out to the south. To the west is a rather impressive range built in a pared-down Arts-and-Crafts manner in 1904 by J. T. Micklethwaite to provide a ballroom and services. Also to the west is a private chapel with a tower. The chapel has unusual architectural details, and windows and niches filled with a variety of figure carvings of the 14th to 17th centuries, probably thrown out during 19th-century church restorations. Within the chapel is a Norman font found on the estate, and two figures from a 17th-century church monument.

Even when one has disentangled which parts of the house were built by the first Stephenses and which by the last, there is still a difficulty in deciding when the Gothic Revival works were carried out and when the fascinating collections of woodwork, glass and stone carvings were installed. There is no direct documentation for any of it, although early engravings offer some help. The odd windows in the main front are already shown in a print titled Chavenage, the Seat of Henry Stephens, which could mean Henry Willis Stephens or his predecessor. The chapel tower was standing by 1803, and the strange windows on the east front (even stranger than they are today) are shown in an aquatint of 1817 which shows the tower already well clothed in creepers.

An inventory of the house's contents, also made in 1817, mentions the organ gallery, so the made-up screen must have existed by then. In the grounds are the remains of a Gothic-Revival grotto, much more likely to be 18th century than 19th.

Some, at least, of the interior woodwork and the stained glass may have been installed in the next generation by Maurice Townshend-Stephens. In 1817, three tapestry bedrooms are mentioned; there are only two now. Some years ago, a blocked doorway behind some of the extant tapestry was found to be papered over with a newspaper of 1840. The genuine medieval windows in the porch and the billiard room and the many fragments of stone carving are more likely to have been introduced in the 19th century than earlier.

The 1845 poem that retold the story about Nathaniel Stephens's ghost must have been written and published with Maurice Townshend-Stephens's active encouragement, although he seems to have lived mainly at Thornbury. All these complexities suggest that there have been at least two periods of antiquarianism at Chavenage, not just one, and what one knows of Henry Willis Stephens's dissociation from reality suggests strongly that much of it must have been his. What one can safely say is that this antiquarian work adds much to the enjoyment of the Tudor house. Much of its idiosyncrasy (and incidentally the difficulty of dating it) may be due to its having been done by the house's owners themselves, without an architect.

But the question of who did what is still further complicated by the fact that much of the glass in the windows of the house was said in 1899 to have been found in boxes by a recent tenant, who apparently also found further tapestry folded away—perhaps from the third tapestry bedroom. The most extraordinary of all the finds in the house was one which raises even more questions about its 19th-century history. This was a series of drawings found in 1969 for the decoration of the state rooms at Windsor Castle, built by Sir Jeffrey Wyatville between 1826 and 1828. These are initialled by the King, and must at some stage have been in the hands of the decorators Morel and Seddon.

It is hard to imagine how they could have reached Chavenage, although it does suggest that someone with an interest in interior decoration was in the house in the 1830s or 1840s. Who this was, and what they may have done, are among Chavenage's many mysteries. However that may be, when these drawings were sold at Sotheby's in 1971 they were bought for the royal archives, and with the money raised Mr and Mrs Lowsley-Williams were able, with the help of the Historic Buildings Council, to repair the roof of the house.

Whatever problems past generations have left to solve, they also left the means of keeping Chavenage standing: a friendly and hospitable house where a ghost seems most unlikely. Perhaps it really was carried off by a headless coachman.

Chavenage House in Chavenage, Tetbury, is open to visitors, as well as film crews — see their website for more details.

Britain is full of architectural talent and ideas. So why is our affordable housing in such a state?

'We need to think of unusual sites and then do something special with them,' says the architecture critic and writer Jonathan Glancey, who joins James Fisher on this week's Country Life Podcast.

Making housing better for all of us — not just the privileged few — is at the heart of the discussion between James and Jonathan, just as it's one of the key issues in Jonathan's latest book, Where We Live: The Fractured Art of British Housebuilding and How to Build the Homes We Need, which is out in June 2026.

Jonathan's years of experience and expertise — from his first job at the The Architectural Review to his many years as The Guardian's architecture and design editor — shines through as he talks about everything from the model villages built by the great railway companies of Victorian Britain through to the huge mistakes made in social housing between 1945 and 1990.

He illuminates the topic in fascinating detail, in a talk which is by turns inspiring, depressing and forward-looking. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

Where We Live: The Fractured Art of British Housebuilding and How to Build the Homes We Need is published by Icon Books on June 20, 2026 — you can order a copy now from all good bookshops.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Jonathan Glancey

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Bethany Handley

Producer and Editor: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

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Treworgey Manor, situated in the mystical parish of St Cleer, south of the famously harsh Bodmin Moor, was built from granite hewn from the surrounding foreboding hills and had existed in its wild surrounds since the reign of Henry VIII. Neighbours included Bronze Age burial kists, striking rock formations (such as Cheesewring) and menhirs (ancient standing stones).

The manor house, whose name means 'farmstead by the hill' in Cornish, was a modest one, erected for a successful Wiltshire tanner called Cannock or Connock (spellings vary). It remained in the same family well into the 20th century.

It was rumoured that, inside, there was a secret staircase, concealed by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. This, so the story went, led to a passage containing the coffin of a former owner, buried with his treasure. Another member of the family was said to have been starved to death while incarcerated in a dungeon in the outer courtyard. His crime? Refusing to denounce his Roman Catholic faith.

Yew trees flanked the eerie house — a plant long associated with three forms of defence. One) poison: ingestion can prove fatal to a myriad creatures including humans and horses. Shakespeare had Macbeth concoct a deadly brew containing 'slips of yew'. Two) bows: the archers at Agincourt and Crécy, and, later, Robin Hood were said to favour the strong wood for their weapons. Three) symbolic protection: yew has long symbolised guardianship, immortality, and resurrection, with a deep-rooted history of protecting both homes and churchyards. What-is-more, yew trees continue to grow and spread even when their heart has died.

When Country Life’s then chief photographer, Charles Latham, visited in 1904, with his giant wooden glass plate camera, he photographed a magical scene: Treworgey Manor nestled in its woodland dell and flanked by four giant yew trees standing sentry, alongside two Roman soldier statues, at the south-west-facing entrance.

Architectural Editor H. Avary Tipping described the trees as 'surely among the most curious in England… the topiary sculptor has gone to work in the spirit of much originality.’ Unusually lost for words, he called on readers to study Latham’s artistry and observe the ‘huge billowy creations’ for themselves.

Tipping had very little to say about the house itself, except an 'excellent staircase' (his pleasure was tempered by the fact that the the oak balustrades were 'wearing a coat of paint') and a curious clock tower — the face of which has the words 'Every Hour Shortens Life' written on it.

A thorough redecoration of the very old property, estimated to cost about £18,000 in today's money, was done in early 1938. However, on May 5, while a strong north-east wind swept the country, a fire broke out.

Owner Billy Marshall hurried his family out of the house (in their 'night attire' according to a local newspaper report) as the Liskeard Brigade prepared to bravely battle the flames. Unfortunately, they were woefully ill-equipped.

Fed by the wind and fresh paint, the fire tore through the house — one of Cornwall's oldest — in under two hours. Only a handful of outhouses, the clock towers and yew trees survived.

Little time was wasted with plans for a new, smaller property submitted by and approved in October of the same year. That house, along with the outhouses, the clocktower and the four yew trees (their protective qualities somewhat up for discussion) still stand today.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

By private act of Parliament, passed on June 20, 1801, an attempt was made to rationalise the hopelessly involved affairs of John FitzGerald, Knight of Glin. As the long text of this bill ‘for raising by sale or mortgage monies sufficient to pay off incumbrances’ makes clear, his problems were inherited. They had at their heart the profligacy of his uncles and an attempt by his father, Thomas, two decades previously, in April 1781, to make generous financial provision for all his children. The resulting demands for money, interest payments and the steady multiplication of legal cases far outstripped his considerable income of about £4,000 a year.

In ordinary circumstances, the situation would have been ruinous. Fortunately for FitzGerald, however, his difficulties coincided with a period of sustained political upheaval in Ireland that culminated in the violence of the 1798 Rebellion. One direct consequence was the Act of Union that brought Irish MPs to Westminster for the first time in January 1801 and, in turn, made possible the act of Parliament to settle his affairs. The sheer complexity of the competing legal claims, meanwhile, undermined any attempt to dispose of the estate in an organised fashion. FitzGerald also successfully argued in court that none of his inheritance should be sold at less than its true value, frustrating two attempts at fire sales.

As the act presents it, FitzGerald had materially added to the value of his heavily mortgaged property both by fighting to maintain it and expending ‘six thousand pounds and upwards in building a mansion house and offices, and making plantations and other valuable and lasting improvements upon the said estate’. Given all his other difficulties, quite where money for this new house had come from is unclear. The likelihood must be that it was provided by the dowry of his wife, Margaretta Maria, née Gwyn, the daughter of a wealthy Dorset family, whom he married in 1789. Whatever the case, the investment created most of what is now known as Glin Castle.

FitzGerald’s house was new, but his family association with Glin — which continues to the present day — was not. The FitzGeralds are descendants of the great Anglo-Norman dynasty known as the Geraldines. In 1169, Maurice FitzGerald, son of the castellan of Pembroke and the Welsh princess Nesta, came to Ireland as an adventurer to help restore Diarmait Mac Murchada, exiled king of Leinster, to his kingdom. In the conquest of Ireland that famously ensued, two branches of the family — those of the Earls of Kildare and the Earls of Desmond — became established.

The latter branch, the so-called Geraldines of Desmond, secured extensive territories in Limerick, Kerry and Waterford and intermarried locally. They also further divided over the course of the Middle Ages — and in slightly uncertain circumstances — established three junior lines, titled respectively the White Knight, the Knight of Kerry and the Knight of Glin. According to tradition, these hereditary titles — for which there is no British parallel — were bestowed by Edward III on the three younger brothers of the Earl of Desmond after the English victory over the Scots at the Battle of Halidon Hill in 1333.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the late-13th-century figure of Sir John FitzJohn, or Seán Mór na Sursainge, is claimed as the first Knight of Glin. The last in the line, the father of the present owner, who died in 2011, and whose remarkable legacy will be described in the next article, was the 29th. Several figures in this exceptionally long lineage have been further distinguished by titles that reflect their colourful exploits. They include Edmund of Battles, who died in 1628, the Spanish Knight, who died in 1659, and the Duellist, who died in 1775. There is an unusually large historical literature about this colourful family in both Gaelic and English.

The seat of the Knights of Glin was originally in the town of Glin, at what is now known as the Old Castle. Its ruinous tower still commands the main bridge over the River Glencorbry, close to where it meets the Shannon. It was twice besieged by government forces in 1600 and 1642 and stands as a monument to the Gaelic and Catholic sympathies of the family in the 16th and 17th centuries. During the 18th century, however, the Old Castle seems to have been abandoned in favour of a modest nearby ‘lodge’, which probably stood close to the present house.

Meanwhile, as a means of retaining property and influence, the family married into Protestant families and the four brothers who consecutively inherited the estate and title in 1730, 1737, 1763 and 1775 conformed in almost perfect sequence to the Anglican communion. It was the last of these who handed an accumulation of difficulties

to John FitzGerald, his young son and the builder of the present house, in 1781. FitzGerald choice of a Dorset bride in 1789 marked an important break with the past. The Knights of Glin had always married into Irish families, yet he was described in 1781 as an absentee landlord. Newspaper reports, meanwhile, imply that Glin Lodge was leased out or in the hands of creditors.

In short, the probability must be that he was living in England when he met his future wife. There remained, however, a strong streak of Anglo-Irish patriotism as well, expressed not only by his eventual return, but his early involvement with the volunteer movement. Established to protect Ireland from French invasion and inspired by the American Revolution, the volunteers briefly became a major political force in Irish politics. A portrait in the hall shows FitzGerald posing beside a cannon in the uniform of the Royal Glin Artillery Company, one of three volunteer regiments with which he was associated.

Given his circumstances, it’s no surprise that FitzGerald desired a modern house, but there is no documentary record of who created it for him. The site chosen stands just outside the village, on a gentle slope that drops to the Shannon. In the 18th century, the broad mouth of the river — which is about three miles wide at this point — would have been busy with traffic sailing to and from the prosperous port of Limerick nearly 25 miles upstream. It’s likely that the builder and craftsmen who worked on the building came from the city. All its more sophisticated architectural detailing could easily have been copied from published treatises of the period.

The main house is rectangular in plan and three storeys high with flanking bows to the front and rear (Fig 1). These bow windows are, respectively, semi-circular and faceted in plan, a curious contrast. The two also incorporate distinct forms of fenestration, the former inset with mullions and transoms. Are we looking at evidence of one façade having been heavily remodelled in the 19th century? A long, low service range extends to one side of the building and may cannibalise the modest remains of Glin Lodge.

The central front door has a Doric doorcase with a fanlight above. It takes the visitor into a spacious hall that — unusually — runs into the depth of the building rather than across it (Fig 2). A fine decorative plaster ceiling covers the interior, its detailing picked out in colour. Incorporated within it are the impaled arms of FitzGerald and his wife as well as the Irish harp, insignia of the volunteers, and a hunting horn. There are also figures emblematic of Justice, War and Peace. The detailing reflects a restrained neo-Classical taste distantly conscious of the work of Robert Adam and James Wyatt.

A screen of columns defines the hall threshold and at the far end of the room is a fireplace of imported Portland stone flanked by doors that open into a fine staircase beyond. The stair splits at a half landing, creating a grandeur of form slightly beyond the scale of the building (Fig 6). A Venetian window lights the stair and the interior is ornamented with decorative plasterwork repainted in the mid 19th century, the latter work attributed to the Dublin firm Sibthorpe.

To either side of the hall and stair are the four principal polite interiors of the house including what are today a drawing room, dining room (Fig 5), sitting room and library. These include a fine series of marble fireplaces, although several are 20th-century imports from other houses (Fig 3). The library also incorporates a fine, pedimented bookcase that conceals a jib door. The principal bedrooms occupied the first floor and, curiously, the top floor remained unfinished with bare walls into the late 20th century.

FitzGerald died in June 1803, two years after his wife, and his precarious finances immediately forced a sale of the contents of the house and the mortgage of the property. He was succeeded by his 12-year-old son, another John. Educated at Winchester and Cambridge, he reputedly revitalised the family fortunes through gambling and became known as the Knight of the Women. A fluent Irish speaker, he established a reputation as a scholar of medieval Gaelic poetry and became a member of the Royal Irish Academy in the 1820s, as well as a founder of the Irish Archaeological Society in 1841.

This combination of interests almost certainly explains his recasting of Glin as a castle, the only kind of residence suitable for a figure with his lineage. The change was effected cosmetically with the addition of a cresting of battlements and can probably be precisely dated with reference to newspaper reports. On September 16, 1826, the Limerick Chronicle reported the theft of the Knight’s sheep from Glin ‘house’, but on March 14, 1827 (and consistently thereafter), the same paper listed the ‘Knight of Glin of Glin Castle’ as a member of the Grand Jury for Limerick County. Probably at the same time he added other castellated lodges to the estate (Fig 4).

In 1830, FitzGerald was lampooned by political enemies in one scurrilous verse that included the lines ‘His vices have made, and still make him, so poor/That Bailiff or Creditor’s ne’er from the door/But deep tho in debt, yet he’s deeper in sin/That lecherous, treacherous Knight of the Glin.’ Rather more flattering is a description in The history, topography and antiquities of the county and city of Limerick (1826). ‘The Knight of Glin,’ it reports, ‘resides in a noble mansion built by his father; and he appears anxious, in every respect, to promote the happiness of his tenantry, who are, in consequence, generally comfortable and contented.’

In fairness, he did prove a supportive landowner during the Great Famine and died in 1854 of cholera, apparently contracted at a poorhouse that he served as a governor. The subsequent history of Glin into the 20th century is more one of personalities than architectural change. His heir, another John, became known as ‘The Cracked Knight’ for his impulsive and eccentric behaviour. He had a fascination with chamberpots and allegedly burnt the family papers.

In 1866, Desmond ‘the Big Knight’, succeeded him and abandoned the management of the estate to his wife, Isabella, née Lloyd Apjohn. This was another period of political ferment in Ireland, culminating in the Land War of 1879–82, and the estate was pushed deep into debt. His son and heir, yet another Desmond, succeeded as 27th Knight of Glin in 1895. Following the Land Act of 1903, he sold a large portion of the estate, as well as another family property, Riddlestown. Some furnishings from this house now survive at Glin. In 1923, during the Irish Civil War, the castle narrowly escaped destruction after the Knight of Glin reputedly told the arsonists who came to destroy it: ‘Well, you will have to burn me in it, boys.’

In 1929, the 28th Knight of Glin married Veronica Villiers, a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, and the couple set about restoring the castle with limited means. Following the Knight’s early death from tuberculosis in 1949, however, his son, aged 12, succeeded to the title. Then, a few years later, in 1954, Veronica remarried to a wealthy Canadian businessman, Horatio Milner.

It was Milner’s fortune that saved Glin Castle and its estate from ruin in the late 1950s. In the next article, we will turn to the achievement of Desmond FitzGerald, 29th Knight of Glin, his wife, Olda, and now his daughter Catherine in preserving the castle through 21st-century challenges.

Find out more at the Glin Castle website.

This feature originally appeared in the print issue of Country Life on April 22, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The FBI’s surveillance of the LA-based architect Gregory Ain began in 1944 and continued for another two decades.

For a while, Ain was on Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Security Index, a list of particularly subversive individuals. As the red scare grew during the 1950s, he lost major contracts and, in a process hard to detail, was sidelined. He had the world at his feet.

Apprenticed under the great designer of signature LA homes, Richard Neutra, he was then the chief engineer in the studio of Charles and Ray Eames, developing the plywood moulding machines that would result in the famous Eames chair, which he made the first model of. In 1950, Phillip Johnson commissioned him to design and construct a model home in the gardens of MoMA and although previous model homes were sold on, Ain’s strangely disappeared.

What is left though is striking. His commitment to low-rise, suburban housing was remarkable. The Mar Vista Tract, on the west side of Los Angeles, between Venice Beach and Culver City was completed in 1948. The original plan envisioned 100 houses on 60 acres, but just 52 were ultimately built on three streets after sales progressed slowly. Marketed as ‘Modernique Homes’, the development promoted its progressive design, flexible interiors and strong indoor-outdoor connections.

Although they cost more than nearby speculative houses, Ain cut costs by using a single plan with a modest square footage, but added variety and nuance to the street through shifting the placement of the garage and rotating the plan. Although delivered with exactly the same tools, Mar Vista is a million miles away from the dreaded ranges of identikit suburban housing.

There is so much subtle stuff going on in this lushly planted site. Mar Vista is effectively a collaboration with the landscape architect Garrett Eckbo. Together the pair conceived the neighbourhood as a park-like environment without fences, with homes set back from the road. Eckbo, who had designed camps for migrant agricultural workers in California's Central Valley, planted different fruit trees — mulberry, plum and guava trees — in each yard to encourage neighbors to trade and thereby socialise. And whilst he created a lush integrated landscape of Lombardy poplar, olive and dwarf eucalyptus trees elsewhere across the site, he gave each street a unique character by adding ficus on Beethoven Street, melaleuca on Moore Street and magnolia on Meier Street. Architecture and landscape merged into a single vision of modern suburban life.

The homes were for a middle class buyer. Prices were higher than nearby developments and are much higher now. The typical house is not big, measuring just 100sq m, excluding the double garage. However, folding partitions allowed living spaces to expand or divide as families changed. The number of bedrooms could be expanded from one to three using sliding panels, maximizing flexibility. Using a colour scheme devised by the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, Ain applied coordinated palettes inside and out, with each wall in subtle variations of a dominant tone. Influenced by the ideas of pediatrician Benjamin Spock, he opened the kitchen toward the living room and yard so mothers could watch children while working, while movable blinds and panels provided privacy when needed. Cabinetry separating rooms became both functional storage and organizer.

Mar Vista became Los Angeles’s first postwar Modern historic district, in 2003, an example of how thoughtful design and landscaping can be inspired by subtle ideas about how to constitute a community that go far beyond politics.

‘Whether decay and disappearance are to be the fate of the whole batch of our oversized country seats is too early to decide, but the doom of Hamilton Palace is imminent.'

So read the eulogy from the opening paragraph of H. Avary Tipping’s 1919 series of articles in Country Life on the sprawling Lanarkshire landmark.

The Hamilton family occupied the hugely-profitable land — that the palace of the same name stood on — since the family were gifted it by James II of Scotland, sometime after 1452. The first known building on the site of the aforementioned Palace dated to 1591.

While the original house was substantially added to over the ensuing centuries — most notably by the 3rd Duke and Duchess, who added a grand entrance portico, executed by James Smith, the like of which had never been seen in Scotland before — it wasn’t until the 19th century that Hamilton Palace was to reach it’s vast, some may say bloated, size that would prove too excessive to maintain in the ensuing one.

Alexander Hamilton was, it would be fair to say, flamboyant (think George IV, and you're not far off). He had spent most of his 20s in Europe, predominately Italy, amassing an impressive collection of artefacts using the allowance his father awarded him. That collection would grow exponentially, firstly after his marriage to a distant cousin, Susan Euphemia Beckford, of Fonthill Abbey, and secondly, in 1819, when his father died.

Alexander believed that he was the true heir to the Scottish throne (his ancestor had married the daughter of James II) and thus went about turning his castle into a palace. The cost of expanding his already-substantial home was leveraged against his newly-inherited wealth from the coal fields on his newly-inherited land.

No expense was spared. Work began in 1824 and the finished structure was said to exceed Buckingham Palace in length. There were more than 140 rooms in which Alexander and Susan displayed their mesmerising collection. This included the Duchess of Hamilton’s library, inherited from her father, William Beckford.

A new double staircase was carved out of black marble; a vast Stone Hall was erected in order to display Alexander’s ancient marble busts and statues; and a Grand Egyptian Hall was build to house his treasures from that land.

However, Alexander went a step further, also commissioning a mausoleum in the grounds and ordering the re-internment of his ancestors in its lower levels. Perhaps inspired by the acquisition of the sarcophagus of an Egyptian queen — ostensibly for the British Museum — he left instructions in his will for his remains to be mummified and placed in the same coffin. Sadly, though he tested the sarcophagus for size multiple times, while alive, he failed to account for his mummified size. And so it was that after his death in 1852, the man who was unflatteringly described in one obituary as 'the proudest man in England' was laid to rest with broken legs (the surgeon charged with mummifying his remains was forced to snap them, in order to shoehorn his body into the ancient resting place).

And more misfortune was to follow. The next Duke had little interested in Scotland or, indeed, the UK, choosing to live, instead, in Paris and Baden. When he died suddenly in 1863, the title passed to his 18-year-old son, William.

The 12th Duke found himself in charge of a vast property portfolio with little capital to maintain it. The pressure was temporarily lifted by his racehorse, Cortolvin, who won the Grand National in 1867, but it soon fell upong the young aristocrat to ‘sell the family silver.’ Fortunately, there was a lot to sell.

Christies hosted the gargantuan sale in 1882 which included gold and silver wares, furniture, fine Japanese and Chinese porcelain, bronzes, busts, rare coins, historical portraits, furniture that once belonged to Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry, and art by the likes of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Holbein, Bronzino and Durer.

The sale took place over more than 17 days and fetched an astounding £397,562 (about £42 million in today’s money). Meanwhile, Sotheby’s were entrusted to sell off the Beckford and Hamilton Libraries, featuring rare manuscripts and books, which netted an additional £786,847 — bringing the 2026 equivalent total to more than £125 million.

When the family retreated to the more manageable Dungavel House, the Palace fell largely silent.

In 1919, Country Life’s Avary Tipping and staff photographer Alfred E. Henson were invited to photograph what remained before that, too, was auctioned off.

Entire rooms were sold off and transported around the globe, including 11 which were purchased by the American equivalent of the 10th Duke, William Randolph Hearst.

In 1921, Hamilton Palace was demolished, thanks to coal mining subsidence (the sinking or settling of the ground surface caused by the collapse of underground mine workings) — though they were still at it in the early 1930s.

The 10th Duke’s mausoleum still stands, thought there is no one inside. The bodies were unceremoniously carted off in a coal wagon to a nearby graveyard when it was feared that the monument might also sink.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

According to the antiquarian Edward Hasted, writing his voluminous History of Kent (1797–99), The ‘Calicoe-house’ on the main street of Newnham village took its name from ‘the red and white plaistering on the front of it’. By implication, the striking panels of floral decoration that still survive on the building — one dated 1710 — were inspired by the bold, printed patterns of this Indian cotton fabric that was being imported to Britain in quantity for the first time from the late 17th century. The colouring has been renewed over time, but then — and now — they make this remarkable building of brick and timber frame stand out (Fig 2).

The story of Calico House, however, is very much deeper than this association would suggest. Recent research by Rupert Austin and Sheila Sweetinburgh, published in Archaeologia Cantiana (2010), has revealed a complex history and architectural evolution that stretches back into the Middle Ages. Timber-frame buildings were relatively easy to adapt and this example shows exactly how much even a relatively modest house might change incrementally over time. In addition, their study has identified some of the individuals who occupied the house. Notable among them was a prosperous yeoman farmer, Stephen Hulkes, who transformed the building before 1617 as a modest family seat.

Newnham — which means ‘the new place’ — was seemingly constituted as a manor in the early 12th century and, in 1153, the parish church and its associated property formed part of the founding endowment of a Benedictine nunnery established at Davington nearby. That gift almost certainly included the site of Calico House, because centuries later ownership of it bestowed rights of appointment to the church living. Whether a house stood here at this date, however, is unknown. The story of the present building properly begins in about 1400, when the nunnery at Davington seems to have been struggling in the aftermath of the Black Death.

There is little documentation to illuminate the specifics of what happened in this Kentish locality, but, nationally, the pandemic is estimated to have carried off more than one-third of the population. Not only were most religious communities much reduced, but the universal shortage of labour transformed rural society as a whole. Rather than running their estates directly, landholders increasingly found it easier to lease out or ‘farm’ property in return for regular rents. That, in turn, brought into being a class of ‘farmers’, who owned or managed land independently and were free from what was effectively feudal enslavement.

One such farmer probably took control of Davington’s estate at Newnham and began Calico House. Neither their identity nor the precise date of construction are known, but, as first built, it took the form of a so-called Wealden house. About 800 extant examples of this timber-frame house type are known, nearly all in the South-East, with the majority in Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Of the 40 or so of these buildings that have been scientifically dated, all were constructed between 1340 and 1525, but the type seems to have been most common in the early to mid 15th century.

Wealden houses were laid out on a rectangular footprint and comprised a central hall neatly sandwiched between flanking two-storey blocks. Their internal organisation reflected the universal norms of medieval English domestic planning. The hall was heated by a central hearth and possessed a ‘high’ and ‘low’ end, the former occupied by a ‘high’ table for the head of the household and the latter an entrance and service area. At ground-floor level, corresponding to this hierarchy of space, the flanking blocks respectively accommodated a reception room or ‘parlour’ and a pair of chambers for storing food and drink, the buttery and pantry. Both blocks had bed chambers on the upper floor accessed up internal stairs.

What made the Wealden houses distinctive was that the upper rooms of the flanking blocks were jettied out over the walls of those on the ground floor (to make them bigger) and the whole structure was covered in a single roof. As a result, the roof eaves — which spanned from jetty to jetty — projected deeply to either side of the narrower central hall. Contrary to what their modern patterns of survival in predominantly rural settings suggest, the origins of this regular building type probably lay in an urban context.

All that survives of the Wealden-type building at Calico House is the much-altered service block at the low end of the hall. At ground level, the two doors to the buttery and pantry remain and, although the timbers have never been scientifically dated, their relatively massive dimensions would be typical of construction methods of about 1400 (Fig 1). Fossilised in the structure is evidence for an internal stair to the upper floor of the block. The remainder of the house has since been repeatedly redeveloped, all the while essentially preserving its medieval arrangement of rooms.

Probably in the 15th century, the hall of the building was reconstructed on a larger scale. One wall of this structure between the high end of the hall and the two-storey block beyond it remains today. Preserved in the framing are peg sockets for the fixed bench behind the high table. At about the same time, a free-standing building was constructed just to the rear of the main house. Then, in the 16th century, the hall was again rebuilt, this time as a two-storey range.

This change is a commonplace one for the period, creating an additional large room at first-floor level. The central hearth had to be abandoned and, to heat both interiors, a fireplace—since removed, but leaving a gap in the original framing—was added to the rear of the new range. An oriel window was also created to light the high end of the hall.

From the limited evidence available, it’s hard to attribute these changes to any particular owner. By 1535, however, the nunnery had failed and its property at Newnham passed through several hands during the 16th century. Eventually, in April 1617, it was bought by a certain Hulkes, described as being a ‘yeoman of Newnham’, together with his son, John, and grandson Thomas, for the considerable sum of £1,400. It’s possible that Hulkes was already a tenant of Calico House. Whatever the case, he was not a gentleman and the purchase underlines his considerable resources as a farmer.

In acquiring this property jointly, Hulkes’s principle aim must have been to establish the fortunes of his descendants because it seems likely that his health was already failing. Certainly, only eight months later, in December 1617, he drew up his will. The will and an appended inventory added after his death in July 1618, refer to his ‘new’ house, the names of the rooms it contained and their relatively sparse furnishings. Read in conjunction with the surviving fabric, they make clear that he had undertaken another important round of changes, creating much of Calico House as we see it today (Fig 7).

The central hall and the chamber above largely remained in 16th-century form. Hulkes’s armour, presumably for service in the local militia, was stored in the hall and there were two tables here. In the upper room over the hall, there was a featherbed, a desk and wall-hangings. Some evidence for wall paintings has also been found in this interior.

Meanwhile, by 1617, the medieval service block had been heavily reworked, creating what is described as ‘my painted chamber’ over the earlier buttery and pantry. Remarkably, much of this decoration remains (Fig 4). It depicts a grid of panelling inset with strapwork decoration and representations of polished stones. As is typical of domestic wall paintings, the design is executed in cheap pigments. There is also the fragment of a quotation from Proverbs 4:3-4; aphorisms and Biblical texts were another common feature of domestic wall-painting schemes in this period. The room contained a bed with curtains, window curtains, some oak stools and a chest with three locks for valuables.

Meanwhile, Hulkes completely rebuilt the block at the opposite end of the hall, creating two well-appointed rooms, a parlour still lined with wainscotting (Fig 6) and a chamber over it. The former included chairs, stools and tables as well as a cupboard, the latter a bed with pillows and curtains, window curtains and another chest. Both were lit by an oriel window and provided with an ornate fireplace rising from floor to ceiling. The overmantles are made of brick faced in decorative plaster and that in the parlour incorporates the initials SHIH for Stephen and his wife, Johan (or possibly his son, John), in its upper frieze. The same initials also appear in a brick panel on the exterior of the house.

At the same time as these additions were made, the lower floor of the free-standing 15th-century service building to the rear of the house was converted into a kitchen (Fig 8). Its new fireplace and oven were set back to back with the fireplaces in the adjacent parlour block and the flues share a massive brick chimney stack that links the two buildings together (Fig 9). The cooking utensils listed in the kitchen included a jack and weights and two wheeled spits for roasting meat. There was also a well in the back yard and a brew house for beer making.

It’s likely that Hulkes’s son, John, occupied Calico House until his own death in 1651. Assuming so, he or his wife, Elizabeth, who outlived him, might have been responsible for a further round of minor mid-17th-century changes. These involved building the present front porch (Fig 3) and, on the opposite side of the hall, a staircase turret. Access was also provided to an attic floor that was created in this period by flooring over the open roof of the hall range. Simultaneously, an entrance passage was formed across the low end of the hall interior by inserting another brick chimney stack within the volume of the room (Fig 5). Presumably, the 16th-century hall range fireplace was dismantled at this time.

Such was the prosperity of the family that by the late 17th century, Hulkes’s great-grandson, another John, made claim to be a gentleman. He also changed his surname to Hulse. Again, further minor changes to Calico House may be related to him, including some late-17th-century re-fenestration and further additions to the back of the building. An inventory of his possessions underlines a steadily growing quantity and variety of household contents.

Following his death in 1682, the property passed to his widow and then, in 1705, to his godson, also John Hulse. John presumably created the painted panels that give the house its modern name in 1710, but died in 1713 leaving it to his son, yet another John, a minor.

This last John died in turn before coming of age and, in 1720, the property was sold to Col William Delaun, then MP for Kent, and became part of the neighbouring Sharsted estate. With the sale, therefore, Calico House ceased to be a family seat. That may, in turn, explain why it escaped the 19th century without major alteration. The present owners purchased the house in 2006. Lloyd-Brunt is a garden designer and there has been particular emphasis on the development of the garden. They have also lovingly restored and furnished the building, creating a modern home in this ancient house.

This feature originally appeared in the April 15 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There is special spirit in the story of the Transylvanian manor house of Mălâncrav — Malmkrog in German; Almakerék in Hungarian — rescued, in the early 2000s, by conservation charity Mihai Eminescu Trust (MET), formerly patronised by The King when Prince of Wales. Damaged and abandoned for decades, the story of its four-year renaissance deserves wider recognition. One of the most important restoration projects for the MET and its then president, author and artist Jessica Douglas-Home, this exemplary work was recognised in 2006 with a Europa Nostra Award. Significantly, the restoration was achieved entirely by local craftsmen using traditional materials and methods. The project was led and managed by conservation architect Jan Hülsemann, as well as author and conservationist William Blacker, who was at the time MET’s director.

Set in a deep green valley, Apafi Manor, with its long, tall, single-storey range set over a basement, is named after the princely family that built it. An open balcony or loggia runs along the south front and is punctuated by a porch-like entrance (Fig 1). Although initially appearing early 19th century in date, it has the familiar form of regional manor houses of the late 17th and early 18th century. As explored in a 2022 study of Transylvanian manor houses by Bogdan Sorinca, these evolved under the influence of Vienna and the Habsburg monarchy.

The manor, however, also has a much deeper history stretching back into the Middle Ages. During its restoration, a fuller idea of the original building complex emerged and excavations revealed evidence of long- lost outbuildings, including a stable block, a tower and a set of large entrance gate piers. These ‘magnified farmstead’ arrangements were typical of medieval manor-house complexes. As inherited by cousins of the Apafis, the Bethlens, this eventually developed into a house ‘elegantly painted’ with frescos of Old Testament scenes. The basement incorporates what may be the remains of a 17th-century doorcase.

By the 1830s, the manor was the property of a Count Haller, who is credited with rebuilding it in the form we see now. Damaged in a local rising in 1848, it was still in a poor state in the 1860s when British traveller Charles Boner, family tutor to Karl, Prince of Thurn and Taxis, and author of Transylvania, its Products and its People (1865), described seeing its ‘gutted remains’. Restored on a reduced scale, the house was acquired in about 1920 by the Lutheran Church. Seized by the communists in 1949, it became a village hall, with a concrete kitchen on the already reduced east side and a stage in the former parlour. Poorly maintained, it fell into disrepair and was abandoned.

In 2000, it was acquired by the MET, with the approval of village elders, on condition it was restored. Ms Douglas-Home and the MET board of trustees received support from Jeremy Amos of the Horizon Foundation and invited specialists from the UK to contribute their knowledge to the project, including Colin Richards, joint founder of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation, the interior designer David Mlinaric and the garden designer Catherine FitzGerald. Mr Hülsemann led the project with Mr Blacker.

Mr Hülsemann trained at the Academy of Arts in Hamburg, Germany, and has a special interest in traditional carpentry techniques. He spent some years working in Zanzibar and is widely recognised for his sympathetic restorations in the region’s Transylvanian Saxon villages, with their networks of interlocking houses, barns and enclosed yards. His book Das Sächsische Bauernhaus in Siebenbürgen (The Saxon Farmhouse in Transylvania: A guideline for the rehabilitation of old houses) includes many MET projects in the Saxon villages in Transylvania.

Thus, today, Apafi Manor’s condition is a testimony to local building traditions and the survival of ancient skills in the village and surrounding area. Brightly limewashed, with formal gardens surrounded by woods and pastures, it stands close to the fortified parish church (Fig 7), which is protected by a wall and a watchtower. Lutheran since the Reformation, the church retains a parish priest — due to Mălâncrav having the largest Saxon population of any village in Transylvania, after the mass migrations of the 1990s. The church’s interior retains large areas of rare 14th-century wall paintings. The main altarpiece in the chancel (Fig 8) includes donor portraits, plus the arms of Michael and Clara Apafi, and it was the presence of such Hungarian landowners (who remained Catholic after the Reformation), that helped ensure the paintings’ survival.

The church’s close association with the Apafis adds significance to their former manor house and its restoration. Few funds were available for the restoration of Apafi Manor, however, and early proposals from large construction firms were happily set aside after Mr Hülsemann’s simple, sage advice: ‘Use what talent you can find in the village; use all the latent skills in all the surrounding villages.’ This ‘Whole Village’ dictum is a well-established principle in the rescue and revival of historic buildings, emphasising the value of using local craftspeople and builders, providing and sustaining the training for the necessary skills. The Packard Foundation was already supporting the MET’s work and generously funded the Apafi Manor project as a special demonstration of the Whole Village concept.

Apafi Manor’s stonework, bricks, clay roof tiles, floor tiles, internal carpentry and wrought-iron metalwork were all hand crafted by a local workforce using materials to hand. The first phase was managed by Fritz Klutsch from a neighbouring village of Nou Săsesc (Neudorf in German) and the final phase by Ernst Linzing, a builder based in the village. More than 50 people were involved in the different aspects of the job, with the building team entirely drawn from the village.

The missing part of the western end of the range was entirely rebuilt. There is an uneven spacing of columns and window openings, but the whole, nonetheless, has a feeling of rustic symmetry. The old main entrance to the south was reopened and the northern staircase reconstructed. The formal garden layout is centred on a restoration of the lost central fountain, the foundations for which were found during excavations and informed by local memories of the pre-war house.

Father and son stonemasons Bartalis Bela and Bartalis Attila from Târgu Secuiesc restored the coping of the southern porch and remade the stone steps of the external staircase to the north. Gheorghe Căpățână with his son Ovidiu, who run a small carpentry workshop in Gura Râului, near Sibiu, renewed all the windows, doors and shutters, including the French windows to the loggia. The model for the detailing of the inward-opening casements, behind outward-opening shutters, was taken from the nearby parish priest’s house. They also made the wooden staircase and new furniture.

Blacksmith Gabor Matei from Viscri made the wrought-iron balustrade for the north staircase and Ioan Jinariu, a metalworker based in Sibiu, created the traditional door hinges used throughout. White ceramic tiles decorated with the Apafi family crest for the traditional tall stoves were handmade by artisans at Teracota Mediaș, a firm operating since 1906 from nearby Mediaș, in Sibiu County.

All these elements were carefully designed and detailed to a scale of 1:1 by Mr Hülsemann, who states: ‘The small management team of William Blacker, Ben Mehedin and Fritz Klutsch, should be especially recognised for their tireless work to find local skilled craftsmen and supervision of the daily works. They also organised the training sessions with experts such as Henry Rumbold for stonework and myself for traditional carpentry. They worked long days and poured passion and dedication into the project, which, in my opinion, has become part of the spirit of the house, adding something to its original historic interest.’

The decision was taken to remove unsightly modern additions and to re-create the original structure as much as possible, using traditional techniques. With the full extent of the colonnaded loggia reinstated, the western end — as ‘a new build’ — had to be constructed with greater thermal efficiency. This new part of the house contains bedroom suites and bathrooms and is served by a handsome new timber staircase in spruce, with oak handrails and steps. The columns of the external loggia were — as before — built with shaped bricks and mortar, then rendered (Fig 2). All the external joinery was painted in linseed-oil based paint.

Internal timber windows and door frames were made to a carefully considered traditional pattern, the windows in spruce and the parlour and library doors in walnut. Old casement locks were painstakingly refurbished locally and given new keys and locking bolts. The ceilings were plastered onto reed mats and the internal floor tiles, based on surviving originals, were laid in a herringbone pattern. New stoves were created for most rooms, although a stove from a house in Făgăraș was acquired, reconditioned and restored for the main parlour (Fig 6).

The simple interiors were painted in muted pastel colours selected under the advice of Mr Mlinaric, based partly on evidence from the house, also drawing on examples from country houses of the Hungarian nobility, including the home of Count Teleki — between Târgu Mureș (Neumarkt in German) and Reghin (Sächsisch Regen in German) — and the Bethlen family’s Castle Criș. Stencilled friezes and ceiling rosettes were based on evidence found during works.

The central room is now furnished as a common parlour — for both gathering and eating meals — and the easternmost room is a drawing room-cum-library characteristic of such houses (Fig 5), modelled on a 17th-century example in Count Teleki’s country home. Its bookcases and cupboards were specially designed and made up locally in spruce. The furniture includes many regional antiques (Fig 4), some being gifts from benefactor Ilinca Bossy, who also gave many of the books in the library (Fig 3). New beds were made following traditional patterns and the curtains were woven in the village.

The work was begun in 2003 and was completed by 2007, since when the house has been available for letting. It has hosted significant cultural events, including seminars, conferences and concerts. Comfortable, peaceful and well serviced, the house is available for rent for families or groups, which raises funds for MET and helps contribute to its upkeep. The current MET president is Caroline Fernolend, a Saxon conservationist and campaigner based in Viscri (Country Life, May 28, 2025) where her family has been living for centuries. She continues to champion the Whole Village concept and the restoration of Apafi Manor is one of more than 1,300 projects the charity has undertaken in 45 villages.

The house today has the strong atmosphere of simple, elegant country-gentry hospitality, of the type Boner described in the 1860s: ‘There was no embarrassment, though a perfect stranger has dropped among them… The house was neat in the interior, simple in its arrangements but orderly and clean. A flight of steps ran up to the house, along the front of which was a veranda supported by columns. You entered the dining room directly from here… we sat down to a good dinner, a large and cheerful party, and the delicious wine warmed my very heart.’

Patrick Leigh Fermor evoked this same culture in his memoirs of travelling in Romania during the 1930s, published in Between the Woods and the Water. He recorded a little-changed network of gentry life, which was savagely dispersed by war and communist ideology — especially the home of a former cavalry officer, ‘a mixture of manor house, monastery and farmstead… Indoors, shaded paraffin lamps shed their lustre on the fine portrait of an ambassadorial ancestor… I knew that István and his family meant it when they said I should stay all summer’.

Apafi Manor is open to guests — see their website for details.

Acknowledgements: Angelika Beer, Caroline Fernolend, Nicolae Ratiu

This feature originally appeared in the April 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In the late 1960s, smoking in public spaces was de rigueur, so it would have come as a surprise to many to read a November 1969 newspaper article about a proposed and experimental smoking ban at a National Trust property called Sudbury Hall, in Derbyshire.

The reason behind the ban was the installation and trial of new, super-sensitive smoke detectors. If only a few visitors lit up beneath the high-tech devices, the local fire brigade would be immediately alerted and dispatched.

Devon’s Dunsland House was the catalyst for this dramatic turn of events. Situated 15 miles north-west of Okehampton, Dunsland was a rare example of an extended and improved provincial property — with the newest part, built by Arscott Bickford, dating to around 1690. It featured exquisite wood panelling and artisan plasterwork, and had been passed down through the same family for centuries until, in 1945, it appeared on the market for the first time in its history.

As to be expected at the end of the Second World War, the house and 91 acres of land took a while to sell — eventually being auctioned for just £7,250 (about £248,510 in today's money) in late 1947. At the time of the sale, the agents, Jackson-Stops and Staff, declared the house to be in need of ‘considerable repair and redecoration’.

However, the new owner paid little attention to crumbling Dunsland House, concentrating his efforts, instead, on plundering the 91 acres of woodland for its timber.

Concerned for the historic property, the local planning authority asked architect Philip Tilden to make a visit and assess the situation. Tilden had been much sought after in the 1920s, redesigning Chartwell for the Churchills, Port Lympne for Philip Sassoon, and working with Gordon Selfridge on designs for his eponymous London department store, and country estates.

However, by the end of the decade, Tilden’s star had waned. He retreated to Devon where he continued to practice, eventually buying a 15th-century manor house called Wortham, and painstakingly restoring it back to life.

Tilden found Dunsland in a terrible state. In the final chapter of his autobiography, he described the scene that greeted him: 'Two great slate tanks had been fitted at some time above the main staircase to collect rainwater from the roof. The bottom had fallen out of one of the tanks, and whenever it rained all the water from the roof cascaded down the stairs.'

There was only one thing to be done, abandon Wortham and buy the stricken Dunsland from its lazy owner.

According to an article in Country Life, Tilden and his wife lived in 'appalling conditions of discomfort' while they worked to make the most valuable parts of the house watertight and habitable. Sadly, poor health halted Tilden in his tracks and, in 1954, he was forced to offer the house and its land to the National Trust.

The Trust continued with the restoration works — using a sizeable grant from the Ministry of Works — and in 1967 celebrated with a concert held in the 17th-century, panelled Justice Room.

Things came crashing down just four days later when, on November 18, the entire building was consumed by fire. The cause was never established, but it likely won't come as a shock to you to read that smoking is not permitted inside any Trust house.

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As Milan descends on Salone del Mobile this week, yet more discerning observers will ring the doorbell at No. 19, Lansdowne Walk, for the first time in more than four months. The Cosmic House, arguably London’s most beguiling postmodern edifice — and the cosiest of its kind — reopened its gates today after a long winter hiatus. It will be available to visit until December.

Visits to the Cosmic House are capped at 15 guests, and number up to three a day on exceptionally busy occasions. Usually, it is less: scarcity, says the Director of the Jencks Foundation, Eszter Steierhoffer, is integral to the Cosmic House’s allure. Guests ring at the front door but enter through the former garage, accessed through a cast-iron gate and down a flight of stairs to the lower-ground floor, which is now a gallery space, currently showing a specially commissioned moving-image work by British artist Isaac Julien. Above the projector is a half of hollow circular clay casing, with copper wires attached and sleek, horizontal brass bars emanating from its southern end and connecting to a globe.

‘It’s meant to represent the solar system,’ says Eszter, who joined the house museum in 2020. Everywhere across it are symbols and reminders of the cosmos: the spiral staircase, in which each step contains multiple indentures, begins at the bottom of the Zodiac calendar and culminates at the top, with small silver sculptures of each astrological symbol etched into every stair in order of ascendance.

The house is arranged around the motif of a subdivided square. Charles Jencks, its revolutionary architect, was working on a reedition of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture — a seminal tome first published in 1977 — when he bought the house in 1978. ‘It was always his manifesto,’ says Eszter. In other words, his fever dream.

Jencks did not live in the house full-time despite it being his primary residence, allowing him to treat the project on more experimental terms. ‘It is a hybrid, collaborative design that embraces Classicism, the language of London commercial developers of the 1840s, Pop, Post-Modernism and modernity,’ writes Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times’s architectural critic and The Cosmic House’s ‘Keeper of Meaning’.

Jencks’s daughter, however, spent much time at the house when she was growing up, and remains heavily involved in its programs and upkeep. The Cosmic House hosts outreach programs for local school pupils as well as artistic residencies. Guests will typically stay in ‘Nan’s Room’ on the top floor, a space once occupied by the children’s au pair, which comes with its own kitchen.

The Cosmic House was once a classic double-fronted Victorian villa sitting along one of Holland Park’s most coveted residential streets. Jencks, who dedicated much of his career to landform architecture in his second wife Maggie’s native Scotland, began transforming the interiors in the late Seventies and creating the house we can visit today. Arranged over four floors, much of the furniture is cast with inscriptions that toe the line between depth and jest ('Four corners has my bed' stands out as one of the more humourous).

The garden is bedecked with 13 mirrors, one for each month of the year and an extra at the very back named ‘The Future’ — behind which, of course, there is nothing. One of the central tenets of Jencksian architecture was humour, or irony — and leaving enough room for it. By the ‘future’ portal are two wooden beams with the sayings: ‘A la recherche du temps qui vient’ (French for: ‘In search of time to come’) and ‘E arriva dal passato troppo presto’ (Italian for: ‘And it arrives from the past too soon’). The letters — etched in a typeface which Jencks developed himself — are, of course, spelt backwards.

The foreign languages are no surprise: before becoming an architect, Jencks trained as a linguist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a painter (his mother Ruth de Witt Pearl) and a composer and concert pianist (his father Gardner Platt Jencks), he read English Literature at Harvard before turning his attention to buildings, triggered primarily by the construction of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

He pivoted to Harvard’s Graduate School for Design and left with a degree in architecture in 1965, moving to London to continue his studies under Reyner Banham at University College. Banham’s own supervisor when he was at the Courtauld had been none other than Pevsner.

The Cosmic House is as much a monument to Jencks’s architectural endeavour as to his larger attempt to build a vernacular that invites the viewer to submit to a holistic vision. Upstairs, an archive of books and magazines studying his oeuvre offers viewers a closer look at the architect’s world-building. It shows how indelible language was to his understanding of form and materials: the captions for various buildings which he wrote himself talk of ‘Liberace astroturf’ and ‘fascist topiary’.

A true postmodernist, he rearranged and manipulated grammar just as he did shapes and materials: ‘Loggia modern with ungrammatical ionic,’ reads one of the captions, for a building photographed under the heading ‘Neo Class’.

Further items and archival materials are hidden behind cupboards in a corner of the raised ground floor living-room arranged to resemble a kind of faux-atrium. It doubles up as a hall of mirrors. Sir John Soane, the eighteenth-century architect now regarded as Britain’s most significant, ‘was a major point of reference for Charles,’ says Eszter. At his house museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the breakfast room houses no fewer than 100 mirrors across beams, columns and vaults, refracting the sunlight across all corners of the room at all hours of the day. A similar interplay of light and refractions takes place here, where a sunken snug overlooking the south-facing garden allows the light to seep further into the principal floor, which beams it all over the place thanks to mirrored, horn-like sculptures.

If the Cosmic House is an interiors-led manifesto for postmodern living, it also offers the contemporary designer smart ideas on how to blend old and new, reflect the times we live in and let the light in, all at once. As for the horticultural apotheosis of Jencks’s oeuvre, one need only head to Portrack House in Dumfriesshire, where his 12-hectare Garden of Cosmic Speculation gives the natural landscape a similarly bold treatment. It's enough to make any student of the English narrative garden leap out of their own skin and would certainly cause Capability Brown to roll over in his grave. But it is a paean to the architect's love of modernity and science, and to a cohesive, all-encompassing vision that understands man's place in the universe on a subtle and material level.

A shorter version of this feature appears in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

On the morning of Wednesday, September 15, 1926, the new choir of Ampleforth Abbey was consecrated. The ceremony lasted upwards of 4½ hours and, after it was completed, there was a luncheon with speeches to match. Among those who rose to speak was the architect of the building, the recently knighted Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, famous today for such creations as the red telephone box, Battersea Power Station and the restored House of Commons. The Abbey would continue to concern him for the remainder of his life and was only finally completed in 1961, the year after he died. Remote and beautifully set, it remains one of his least familiar creations.

The community of St Laurence at Ampleforth claims descent from Westminster Abbey through the last living survivor from that great medieval foundation, Fr Sigebert Buckley. On November 21, 1607, he formally joined with two English monks to perpetuate the English Benedictine congregation. The day was symbolic, the anniversary of Mary I’s brief restoration of Westminster Abbey in 1556. This embryonic community of three grew and went on to establish several houses in exile. One of these was at Lamspringe, near Hildesheim, Germany, where a school was established. Another was at Dieulouard, in northern France, which supplied priests to the English mission in northern England.

In 1792, the community at Dieulouard fled the French Revolution and moved to England, occupying a succession of large houses, including Vernon Hall, Liverpool. A decade later, the suppression of religious houses by the Prussian government in 1803 likewise forced Lamspringe and its school back. The monks and school were united at Ampleforth in 1803 through shared connections with the Fairfax family at nearby Gilling Castle (Country Life, November 3 and 10, 2021).

The Fairfaxes had long taken English Benedictine chaplains and Charles, 9th Viscount Fairfax, was educated at Lamspringe. His unmarried daughter, Anne Fairfax, anticipated the reversion of the estate to Protestant heirs and, in 1783, built a small house for her chaplain, Fr Bolton, a monk from Dieulouard. The new house stood in open landscape on a steep, south-facing slope on the opposite side of the valley from Gilling. It is from this lost building that the modern school and abbey at Ampleforth have developed.

Fr Bolton’s house was initially expanded east-west along the line of the hill with spreading wings facing south over the valley. Hostility towards Catholics encouraged architectural anonymity and the whole could have been mistaken for an ungainly country house. Following Emancipation in 1829, however, there was greater confidence and an 1840s lithograph of the buildings shows that plans for a new Gothic chapel were under consideration.

Curiously, the steeple of this building was seemingly constructed, but a quite different chapel was in fact completed, in 1857. This was designed by the prolific Catholic architect Charles Hansom, then in partnership with his brother, Joseph. Hansom’s chapel was aligned with the other college buildings, but stood slightly further forward on the slope. It was in the ‘Decorated’ Gothic style, with ornate traceried windows and numerous side chapels.

Three decades later, the London architect Bernard Smith won a limited competition to rebuild the whole school and monastic complex for 40 monks and 150 boys. His plans, which included a Gothic church in a 13th-century idiom, were published in The Builder on April 8, 1893, and were anticipated to cost £136,000. Some progress was made on Smith’s wider proposals, but Hansom’s church was still untouched when the money ran out.

Then, in 1903, Ampleforth was raised to the status of an abbey, further underlining its architectural inadequacy. What finally prompted action, however, were the combined pressures of the growing school — which had increased in size from 113 boys in 1900 to 195 in 1918 — and the universal concern to memorialise those killed in the First World War. Certainly, by 1918 fundraising for both undertakings was being discussed and the two projects quickly merged.

By his own account, the then surveyor of college, a Mr Worthy, based in Liverpool, proposed the name of a suitable new architect. In a letter dated May 3, 1919, the procurator — the official voice of the ‘Building Committee’ that directed all the works at Ampleforth — followed his advice, asking him ‘to approach Mr Gilbert Scott with a view to obtaining his advice and plans for our proposed church extension’. Worthy obliged, forwarding the letter under a note in his own hand.

Scott, a grandson of the great Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, had burst onto the architectural scene at the age of only 22 in 1903, when he won the competition to design Liverpool’s new Anglican cathedral. Apart from his Catholic faith, it was undoubtedly this commission that chiefly recommended Scott to Ampleforth and there are many echoes — both in conception and detail — of the cathedral in the abbey church.

On August 15, 1919, Scott submitted his first proposals for Ampleforth, suggesting the extension of the existing church and the addition of a belfry tower incorporating a large ground-floor chapel, presumably the Memorial Chapel (Fig 8). They came to nothing, however, and, on January 15, 1920, he offered what were essentially the first designs for the present building.

‘I have adopted,’ he explained, ‘an earlier form of Gothic than I originally contemplated; as without sacrificing architectural affect, we can employ a cheaper form of vaulting, window tracery etc. and thus economise. The idea I have in my mind is a severe monastic type of building, founded to a great extent on some of the early French work.’ Specifically, he was inspired by the churches of Aquitaine, such as Cahors and Angoulême, which he had visited just after the war. Characterising these buildings as ‘Gothic’ stretches the label to its extreme.

The new church was conceived as a series of three linked domes flanked to either side by narrow aisles. As executed, all the domes are of the same width, but that in the centre is raised higher than its neighbours and opens out into the space of the adjacent aisles to create a massive central volume. By contrast, the lower domes to either end, are separated from the aisles by triple arches. All the windows are lancets, set singly, in pairs or triplets according to their scale. Externally, a belfry tower rises above the central dome. This is boxed in on each face by steep roof gables. The gables to the north and south read as vestigial transepts and cover the aisles that flank the central dome. Nicked into the tower parapets are the slightest of battlements.

Questioned in 1948, Scott connected the idea of a structure focused internally on a central dome with Wren’s first design for St Paul’s, London, and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (which he admitted he had never seen). At Ampleforth, in other words, he was working in a Gothic idiom that not only rejected the English medieval models beloved of many late-19th-century British architects — and which inspired other new monastic churches such as Downside, Somerset, and Buckfast, Devon — but creatively and freely reimagined the idiom.

Scott needed to attach chapels to this coherently planned church and here the site presented particular difficulties. Building out along the north side of the church was complicated both by the rising hillside and the line of a corridor — the Bell Passage — connecting the monastery to the school. To the south, however, the fall of the land allowed for a crypt with structures over it, in this case the Memorial Chapel and Lady Chapel (Fig 7).

The intention was to realise the church in stages, so Scott’s first dome was planned as a westward extension to Hansom’s nave, necessarily reversing the conventional orientation of the church. Two foundation stones were laid on August 1, one for the choir and the other for the adjacent Memorial Chapel. The choir detailing is executed throughout in Hornton stone from Oxfordshire with all the carving apparently being done at the quarry of the supplier, J. F. Booth and son of Banbury, Oxfordshire.

No sooner had work begun than the new building underwent a transformative liturgical change. The High Altar was initially planned to stand at the termination of the choir, but this left insufficient space for coherent blocks of stalls for the monks. Very unusually, therefore, the architect proposed two altars set back to back on the division between the new choir and Hansom’s nave, one serving each space. Over them — operating partly as a choir screen and partly as a canopy — he designed an arch.

Scott lavished care on this arch as the visual centrepiece of the interior (Fig 5). Hung within it is a cross — supplied by Watts and Co — flanked by sculptures of praying monks and other saints (Fig 3). Carved on the capitals are scenes from the life of Edward the Confessor, possibly inspired by the 1440s High Altar reredos of Westminster Abbey. The candlesticks are integral to the design.

From 1925, furnishings were being installed, including glass by Geoffrey Webb, a nephew of the architect Sir Aston Webb, Powell and Sons, London, and Herbert Hendrie of Edin-burgh. Scott’s choir stalls are jointly inscribed under one board with his name and that of their maker ‘Robert Thompson, craftsman’, familiarly known after his carved signature as the ‘Mouseman’ of Kilburn. A monument for the first abbot of the monastery was commissioned from William D. Gough of Kennington in London (Fig 6).

Following the consecration of the choir in 1926, repeated attempts were made to complete the church and further plans were drawn up in 1933–35, 1937–39, 1947–48 and 1952 (Fig 9). It was not until 1954, however, that the necessary post-war building licence was obtained. A temporary church was raised and, in January 1957, the work of pulling down Hansom’s church finally began.

By this stage, the school had grown yet further and Scott faced the challenge of massively increasing the seating area of the building. He did this by extending the proposed nave with a gallery and adding transepts to either side of the central dome (Fig 4). Great care was taken to make these additions visually subsidiary to the main volume of the building with its central tower (Fig 1). The south transept, projecting out into the valley, however, now became the formal entrance front of the church. Scott insisted that it be approached up a dog-leg staircase.

Internally, all three additional spaces were covered by barrel vaults (earlier plans for an additional dome were rejected). To preserve an illusion of symmetry, meanwhile, the vault of the north transept oversailed the constraining Bell Passage. A section of the passage was rebuilt as a porch or narthex with organ pipes installed over it.

Enlarging the church in turn created problems with its internal sight lines. To make the arched altar canopy visible from the transepts, it had to be moved 11ft towards the new nave. At the same time, dramatic changes of internal level were introduced. In relative terms, the nave and south transept floors were set low and the aisles and north transept floors raised high to the level of the choir.

In the process of redesign, and with a view equally to economy and simplicity, Scott stripped out every architectural ornament. The aisle vaults of the nave became flat ceilings and the detailing in Hornton stone vanished. In its place were simplified mouldings and columns of poured concrete (Fig 2). The walls were constructed of brick rendered internally in plaster. Both new domes were created using a suspended wire frame covered in plaster. Plain and tinted glass set in dense lead lattices filled the windows. The church was consecrated in its entirety on September 6, 1961.

Ampleforth Abbey is not a building that is easy to characterise. In inspiration, the church is a product of the Gothic Revival, but not in its familiar English form. Here, through the prism of French medieval example, and enlivened by an interest in Modernism, Scott created a building of striking clarity, simplicity and spatial coherence. There is discernible as well an Arts-and-Crafts fascination with materials. Despite the complexity of its evolution and prolonged construction, it surely deserves recognition beside his most celebrated creations.

See more at the Ampleforth Abbey website.

This feature originally appeared in the April 8 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Government’s decision last year to cap and then close the Listed Places of Worship Scheme was — in Athena’s view — scandalous and short-sighted. Offering VAT relief for repairs to listed religious buildings, including churches, was of universal benefit and served materially to help deal with a backlog of repairs. This was estimated — before VAT — at more than £1 billion. 

The so-called Places of Worship Renewal Fund now proposed in its place is unquestionably welcome, but it will also be totally inadequate, offering only £23 million a year. If rumours that its disbursements are to be linked to social needs are true, moreover, it promises to be ill-conceived as well. Athena waits eagerly to hear the truth of the matter when the details are released later in April. 

Problems of maintenance and repair, however, are not the only challenges confronted by these buildings in the early 21st century. Depressingly, they are also struggling against the effects of crime. It’s a point that has been strikingly highlighted in recent research undertaken by the Countryside Alliance. Freedom of information requests sent to all of the UK’s 45 territorial police forces asked how many crimes had been recorded last year involving theft in churches. 

To complicate matters, different forces record their crimes in slightly different ways and some do not differentiate between the various kinds of religious buildings. Seven forces have refused to release figures and one has yet to respond. The 37 remaining, however, reported 3,637 crimes in this single calendar year. These included 58 thefts of lead and metal, 1,561 other thefts and burglaries, 1,018 incidents of criminal damage and about 1,000 cases of violence. A further 172 crimes of ‘different categories’ brings the total to 3,809. Overall, that amounts to more than 10 crimes every day in and around religious buildings (but mainly churches). 

Predictably, perhaps, the worst-hit area was London, with 531 crimes recorded by the Metropolitan Police and a further 30 by the City of London Police. This was followed by 445 in West Yorkshire and 172 in Greater Manchester. 

Figures in some predominantly rural counties, however, are shockingly high. Suffolk, for example, reported 109 church offences, including 48 thefts, 40 cases of criminal damage and 21 cases of violence. In Cumbria, there were 21 crimes at churches, including five thefts, 13 cases of criminal damage and three incidences of violence; with 109 in Devon and Cornwall, including 60 thefts, 26 cases of criminal damage and 23 of violence. 

Policing rural crime in all its forms, from livestock theft to fly-tipping, remains difficult and desperately under-resourced. Without counting the human cost, however, these figures contribute to the sense of its ubiquity and scale. Last month, the Government pledged £800,000 funding for the National Wildlife Crime Unit and the National Rural Crime Unit. As is the Renewal Fund for church fabric, that’s welcome, but will it touch the sides of the problem?

This feature originally appeared in the April 15, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The sudden decline in fortunes for Worsley New Hall are sadly familiar. Handed over for use during the First World War, subsequent post-war death duties crippled the family finances so much they had no choice but to abandon the vast property. But unlike so many others before it, while the house has been lost, the gardens have gone on to enjoy something of a 21st century renaissance.

Worsley New Hall was commissioned by Lord Francis Egerton to replace the family’s aging 18th century Brick Hall, which in turn had been built to replace the picturesque, ancient, timber-framed Old Worsley Hall as the Egerton family seat. While the Old Hall was left untouched to convene with nature, as work progressed, the Brick Hall was demolished.

Egerton, an artist and politician, had inherited his family’s fortune in 1837, which had been accumulated over the years from vast investment in the complementary early industrial-era powerhouses that were coal mining and canal building.

His ancestor, also Francis, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, had responded to a fuel crisis — a crisis caused by a lack of wood to fire the ever-hungry furnaces, and the inability to swiftly move coal along primitive road networks — in the 18th century by creating fast, reliable watery transport links, many underground, from his coal fields straight into the industrial heart of Manchester. Within half a century, the Bridgewater Canal connected with Liverpool, and then Leeds, leaving Worsley smack bang in the centre of a highly-profitable transportation super highway.

Soon after moving to Worsley, Egerton commissioned architect Edward Blore, the man famed for finishing John Nash’s Buckingham Palace, to construct New Hall in sight of the canal. The building was to be in the fashionable style of Gothic, with a nod to the crumbling Old Hall in the form of ‘tasteful’ wood panelling. The first sod was cut on December 30,1839. By 1846, the sprawling, turreted stone mansion was complete at a cost of just under £100,000 (more than £9 million in today’s money). The same year Lord Francis Egerton became the First Earl of Ellesmere.

Worsley New Hall was a popular destination for those wishing to explore the industrial and industrious north. Queen Victoria wasted no time in paying a visit to Worsley. A clinker-built rowing boat was swiftly transformed into a ‘Royal Barge’ for Victoria and Albert’s 1951 visit, and ferried the royal couple from the nearby Paticroft Station to New Hall, an experience the queen was to describe as “fairylike”. On the first occasion, the royal couple stayed for two nights while they toured the area. Victoria and Albert must have been amused by their accommodation, paying a second visit, accompanied by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), the Princess Royal and her betrothed, the Prince of Prussia, in 1857. The royal party stayed four nights this time.

Over the coming years, the Prince and Princess of Wales would stay in 1869, and return for a brief luncheon visit in 1909 as Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. This time, the royal party would be conveyed by motor car rather than Royal Barge, a sign that the canals had fallen from favour, an omen for the early Victorian Worsley Hall.

Two weeks after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the third Earl of Ellesmere, also Francis, died. Two weeks after his untimely death, war was declared, and New Hall’s fate was sealed. The family swiftly handed the property over to the War Department. Within three weeks of the British Red Cross taking temporary possession, Worsley New Hall had been transformed into a fully-functioning 150-bed hospital looking after injured British and Belgian servicemen. One of the rooms had even been transformed into a fully-equipped operating theatre. Local businesses provided beds, bedding and towels, and the 4th Lord Ellesmere, along with the particularly generous donation of his family seat, also supplied each wounded man with postcards of the hall so they may write to loved ones showing where they were convalescing.

When the property was finally handed back in 1919, the family were hit with crippling death duties incurred on the passing of the third Earl. Their only option was to sell. Unlike many other comparable country estates, Worsley did sell in 1923 to a co-op of local businessmen. They in turn endeavoured to sell on the now-dated property, but to no avail. In 1939, it was handed back for war use again. Over the following years, it played host to, among others, the Home Guard, a temporary home for Dunkirk evacuees and American forces awaiting deployment to the D-Day landings.

Fire damaged the top floor in 1943. Subsequent inspections found it to be suffering from extensive dry rot and considerable subsidence caused, somewhat ironically, by coal mining. The hall was finally sold for £2,500 (£97,000) to a local scrap merchant. Stripped for what remaining usable parts it had, it was then demolished in 1949, just two years shy of the centenary of the first visit by Queen Victoria.

The medieval Old Hall, however, remained. Having seen off not one, but two successors, the hall now enjoys a new life as a popular public house.

And the grounds of New Hall? From the 1950s, they were again requisitioned by the War Department, and then local government, for a variety of purposes including a radar station, food store and local shooting range. But destruction was, thankfully, not to be the end of New Hall’s gardens’ story.

In the 21st Century, after investment totalling close to £30 million, the regenerated, reinvigorated site opened as RHS Bridgewater on May 18, 2021. It now enjoys a far more bucolic, less explosive, life as the society’s fifth public display garden in the UK. Since its opening, it has opened its doors to over 2.85 million visitors. And while arriving by ‘Royal Barge’ is not mentioned on the gardens’ website, visitors can enjoy a reduced entry fee if they arrive ‘car-free’ at RHS Bridgewater via the RHS Greenway traffic-free cycling and walking route running alongside Lord Egerton’s Bridgewater Canal.

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That Britain escaped a Republican revolution in 1848 has something to do with the policies of Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister from 1841–46. The abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 — although it divided his party and forced him from office — was a key factor in ensuring cheap food for the urban population for the rest of the 19th century. In addition, he worked to popularise the monarchy. By taking advantage of the new railway network, Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, could stay with ‘Your Majesty’s leading subjects’ and, in the process, be seen by the population at large. These events created engagements with the public that foreshadowed the regular royal ‘walkabouts’ that became a popular feature of the 20th-century British monarchy.

Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, her 20-year-old cousin, on February 10, 1840, the year before Peel became Prime Minister. At first, the Queen did not warm to him, regretting the easy charm of his Whig predecessor, the avuncular Lord Melbourne, but she soon came to admire Peel for his integrity and sense and, when he recommended formal visits to country houses as a way of introducing her young consort to England, she saw the point. The first such royal excursion was to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire from July 26–29, 1841, its chatelaine, the Duchess of Bedford, then being a Lady of the Bedchamber.

At Woburn, 10,000 gathered in the park for the royal arrival, as local schoolchildren watched from the terrace and the Duke provided tea for 200 of his tenants in the Riding School. The following day, there were royal excursions, with the chance for people to assuage their curiosity and pay loyal respects, as well as sightseeing, country sports, cricket and fireworks. On different nights, there was a dress ball and a concert under the direction of the Italian composer Giovanni Puzzi, who wrote a piece especially, Composto in Occazione della visita della Regina al Castello di Woburn del Duca di Bedford.

Subsequent house visits repeated the successful Woburn formula, with the additions of loyal addresses from mayors and corporations, lord lieutenants and high sheriffs, parades of the local militia and military bands. Over the next eight years, there would be visits to Arundel Castle, West Sussex; Hatfield House, Hertfordshire; Stowe, Buckinghamshire; Burghley House, Lincolnshire; Penrhyn Castle in Gwynedd; Chatsworth, Derbyshire; and Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, as well as Dalkeith in the Lowlands and Taymouth Castle in the Highlands of Scotland. All are recorded in the Queen’s diary.

Of all these, perhaps the archetypal royal visit was that on November 12–14, 1844, to Burghley House, where the owner, the 2nd Marquess of Exeter, was Steward of the Royal Household. He began improving the house in preparation for a royal visit in 1842, but the work was given added impetus by advance notice of the event itself. His changes included the addition of enclosed corridors around the Elizabethan inner courtyard (Fig 1). Designed by John Gandy Deering, they enhanced the privacy and practicality of the family rooms on the ground floor.

Lord Exeter also modernised the kitchen, employing the latest technology, such as new cast-iron coal-fired cooking ranges and ovens and steam-heated warming cupboards, all provided by Benham & Sons of Wigmore Street, London. This equipment was modelled on that of the kitchen at Charles Barry’s new Reform Club on London’s Pall Mall, which also used Benham’s stoves and had been planned by the renowned chef Alexis Soyer.

At the same time, Lord Exeter restored the Elizabethan Great Hall. This had been used as an art store in the 17th century, then as a parking place for the fire engine, before being converted by the 1st Marquess into a museum for a collection of 80 glass-fronted cases of stuffed British birds. The popular revival of interest in ‘Olden Time’, fanned by the novels of Walter Scott and George IV’s ‘Tudor’ coronation, however, caused an upturn in tourism at Burghley. Added to which, the defeat of the Spanish Armada was re-framed as a happy foreshadowing of the defeat of Napoleon, lending importance to its Elizabethan fabric (Country Life, June 10, 2010).

The stuffed birds were banished to a distant garden temple and in their place was inserted an array of antiquarian joinery put together by Mr Smith, estate joiner, and a ‘minstrels gallery’ erected at the north end. The new panelling incorporated Flemish Baroque woodwork, including barley-sugar oak columns displaced by the French Revolutionaries from the abbey church of Tongerlo in modern Belgium.

Lord Exeter also encouraged an antiquarian approach to reglazing the windows under the direction of Thomas Willement, ‘Artist in Stained Glass to Queen Victoria’. Willement’s scheme included bright heraldic shields portraying Cecil family heraldry, as well as genuine medieval glass from Tattershall in Lincolnshire. A quantity of 15th- century glass had been acquired from this former collegiate church in 1757 by the 9th Earl of Exeter, who installed the majority of it in St Martin’s Church, Stamford. The leftovers served to revive the hall as the main dining room for Queen Victoria’s visit, both luncheon and dinner being served there.

The State apartment, on the first floor, known as the George Rooms after the Order of the Garter, had been remodelled by the 5th Earl of Exeter with ceilings painted by Antonio Verrio (Country Life, July 5, 2017). They formed an enfilade on the piano nobile: the Heaven Room approached by the spectacular Hell Staircase, the dining room, drawing room, state bedchamber, state dressing room and closet. The three middle rooms had been left unfinished when the 5th Earl died in Paris in 1700 and had only been completed and furnished by the 9th Earl under his own direction and using the London furniture firm Fell & Newton in the late 18th century.

The 2nd Marquess now burnished these rooms with additional gilding and silver mounts to the fire grates. In the royal suite, he employed George Morant & Son to refurnish the bedroom and adapt the Fell & Newton bed to make it more practical (Fig 6). Morant furniture must have given the Queen a slight sense of déjà vu, as several of her hosts in the 1840s commissioned bedroom furnishing from them, including the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel Castle for her visit there in 1846. (Country Life, September 3, 2025)

In November 1844, Burghley was ready for the royal visit and there was much appreciative coverage of the event itself in the local press and in the Illustrated London News (which devoted much space to all the royal visits, having been established in 1842). The Queen and her household travelled by the four-coach royal train from Euston to Weedon, then the nearest stop to Northampton on the west coast line. They left Euston at 9.22am with the Royal Standard flying from the engine and a gilded crown on top of the royal carriage. The train sped north at 35mph, very much a public spectacle. Trackside spectators cheered the Queen as she passed by, including, it was noted, many ‘workmen’ in their ordinary clothes and neckerchiefs.

Lord Exeter, in his role as Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire, met the royal party at Weedon. He was in the company of the High Sheriff of Northamptonshire, Sir Henry Dryden, the Justices of the Peace and a Guard of Honour of the 47th Regiment Queen’s Colour (which had travelled there, with their horses, on an earlier train). A public carriage procession conveyed the Queen to Northampton, where she was greeted by the mayor, civic dignitaries and massed schoolchildren in front of All Saints’ Church, before being given luncheon in the Guildhall. Meanwhile, Lord Exeter galloped back to Stamford at speed, in order to be able to greet the Queen again there as Lord of Burghley.

A ‘splendid arch’ designed by ‘his Lordship’s architect’ was erected over the road at Duddington to mark the ‘beginning of Lord Exeter’s property’. Crowds lined the five miles to Stamford, which was decked with flags and ‘Long Live The Queen’ banners. The Royal Party was received by the Mayor and Corporation of Stamford and Lord Exeter gave a dinner at the George Inn for 150 of his ‘chief tenants’, who had formed a greeting party. The Queen arrived at ‘the stately towers of Burghley’ at 4.30pm (Fig 3). The start of the visit had been dogged by drizzle and this now turned to heavy rain.

A diary of the visit by Sophia Cecil, wife of Lord Exeter’s younger son Thomas, describes the arrival of the Queen and Prince Albert at the north entrance door and the introduction in the Red Drawing Room of the other guests. Dinner was at 8pm, with 40 sitting down in the Great Hall as the Coldstream band played in the new Minstrels’ Gallery (Fig 5), after Sir Henry Dryden, High Sheriff, had kissed hands in the Drawing Room and presented a loyal address from the people of Northamptonshire. Lady Sophia noted that the Queen was dressed in black, wore a magnificent pearl necklace and had a Bird of Paradise in her hair.

The next day, the Queen and Prince Albert attended Morning Prayers in the chapel, but breakfasted alone in the Heaven Room. The Royal Party joined the family and guests for luncheon in the Great Hall, Lady Sophia noting that ‘Her Majesty appeared to enjoy her very substantial luncheon of Beef, Partridge etc’. Afterwards, as it was too wet to go out, there was an extensive tour of the house, including the kitchen. The Queen and Prince Albert admired the picture collection and ‘Her Majesty appeared to be much amused at something which turned out to be “His Grace’s Wig and Whiskers” in the Blue Dressing Room where the Duke of Rutland was staying’.

In the evening, the new baby Lady Victoria Cecil was christened in the chapel by the Bishop of Peterborough (Fig 2). Prince Albert was the godfather and chose the name, ‘that which is most dear to me’. The Bishop ‘seemed lost without his spectacles and began the service before the Baby was brought in so he had to stop short and begin it over again’. Afterwards, the Royal Party watched the fireworks on the south side of the lake from the windows of the Heaven Room. The Queen wore large diamond earrings and ‘was dressed in white satin with a wreath of white natural flowers in her hair’. A sprig of the latter was preserved by the new process of gilt electroplating and is still displayed at Burghley (Fig 4). The evening’s entertainment included a Welsh harpist who played in the Marble Hall.

On Thursday, the weather cleared up, the men went shooting in the morning and, in the afternoon, there was a carriage procession to Stamford. ‘The town looked very gay, every window full. Banners and flags. Ringing of bells, cheering etc., and the reception was altogether very enthusiastic.’ Returning to Burghley, the Queen planted an oak tree and Prince Albert a lime on the south lawn (Fig 7). The spade specially made was too heavy, so the Queen used a lighter wooden child’s spade, which is still preserved. In the evening, there was a ball after dinner that went on until 2am, although the royal party retired at 11pm. For this, the Queen dressed in black with a tiara of diamonds and rubies.

The following morning, the royal couple left after breakfast and Lord Exeter accompanied them back to the railway station at Weedon. ‘During the whole time the Queen and Prince appeared much pleased, and everything went off with the greatest success.’

Pictures courtesy of The Burghley House Collection. See the Burghley House website for more. ‘Burghley House’ by John Martin Robinson, with photographs by Ashley Hicks, is out now (Rizzoli, £60).

This feature originally appeared in the March 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The details are what make Le Logis and Floréal in the suburbs of Brussels the most charming garden city in the world. The houses were intended to be, according to architect Jean-Jules Eggericx, ‘humble and enriched by vegetation’. They are just that. Virginia creeper, wisteria and climbing roses roam everywhere. Lime trees extend the façades of houses. Eggericx used a catalogue of clever details he’d lifted from housing projects in England, Belgium and the Netherlands to enrich his compact homes: bay windows, shutters and dormers, all trimmed in yellow (in Floreal) or green to give the buildings variety and personality.

Eggericx was ready for the housing crisis that followed the First World War in his devastated homeland. Although the Belgian government-in-exile was based in Le Havre during the war, the department dedicated to rebuilding the country was based in England, where it was heavily influenced by the evolving principles of the garden city being developed here. Even as Belgium was being blown to bits, members of the Office of Reconstruction of the Devastated Regions pored over plans of Welwyn Garden City and photographed the narrow vennels and small greens between houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

What sets Le Logis and Floréal apart is not just the ingenuity of the wider plan and its social ambition, but the way planning, architecture and daily life were consciously intertwined. In 1919, the Belgian government founded the Société Nationale des Habitations et Logements, which co-ordinated and supported local co-operatives with long term loans at reduced rates. Land became available in Watermael-Boitsfort in the south east of Brussels when the young wife of the late landowner Edmond Parmentier scotched rumour she was a gold-digger by gifting the bulk of her fortune to charitable causes, including the offer of land for this pioneering new suburb at relatively cheap rates.

In October 1921 the employees of a popular bank gathered together to build Le Logis, followed in March 1922 by a group of typesetters who formed a co-operative to create Floréal, named after the eighth month in the French Republican calendar. As Nathalie de Wergifosse, inhabitant, champion and tour guide of these pioneering urban expansions, explains, Le Logis is more homogeneous, while Floréal is ‘more interesting because you have more varieties of housing,’ partly due to the involvement of multiple architects. Different housing types — bungalows, family houses, duplexes, and flats — are mixed deliberately, reflecting the principle that ‘all the models were created to be able to be mixed together’. This avoided monotony while maintaining coherence.

The way in which the developments relate to the landscape is another key element of their unique power to impress the visitor. Town planner Louis Van der Swaelmen designed streets that followed the terrain and even rainwater flow, adapting to Floréal’s hilly ground while a structured and geometric plan takes advantage of Le Logis’s plateau. As de Wergifosse says, ‘the fusion between landscape and architecture is really important.’ Curving streets, terraces, tree-lined avenues, and small vennels create a network of routes that suit human needs, but also their desire for variety and intimacy.

Of course, many countries built garden cities in that small window when adherents of the Arts-and-Crafts movement struggled to deal with the demands of population increases, but before the rise of Modernism. At Betondorp, the Dutch built a rationalist Miami to the south of Amsterdam in the 1920s, volumetrically ingenious, but austere and lacking convivial public spaces. Zlin in Czechia was begun at this time. A company town for the Bata shoe manufacturer, it was built with Ebenezer Howard’s concept at its core. (The ingenious idea of pooling the increase in land prices as the town developed to mutual benefit was invariably extracted from Howard’s proposal abroad and in England.)

However, no-one built anything as brilliantly planned and sensitively executed as the twin settlements of Le Logis and Floréal.

An feature in the April 14, 1934, edition of Country Life offered wise counsel. Counsel that is as true today as it was then: ‘The main causes of country house fires have been well established. They are of two origins, arising from faulty construction and ill-advised adaptations. Before making any structural alteration to an old house, however small, the question should always be asked: Will it increase the risk of fire?'

The reason for this statement was the recent increase of damage to, or total destruction of, dozens of large historic home across the country. Stoke Edith, Lulworth Castle, Hagley Hall, Clifford Chambers, Aylesford, The Friars and Castle Hill had all been decimated by fire. But this piece referred not to any of them, but to a house recorded in the magazine in 1916.

Carclew was first described in Country Life, in 1900, as a 'cold jewel set in a rich blaze of enamel, formed of banks of multi-coloured rhododendrons.’ Situated near the Devoran Creek, above Falmouth, the stark, granite Cornish house enjoyed a climate somewhat warmer than its austere exterior suggested.

The grand old house had been started, but nowhere near finished, in the 1720s. When its owner died, it languished in it’s unfinished, unloved state for about 20 years.

In 1749, William Lemon, a man whose family had made a considerable fortune in copper and tin, retired to the countryside.

Lemon charged his architect, one William Edwards, with the task of altering and enlarging the boxy granite house. He, sadly, did not get to savour the fruits of his architect’s labours — there's a theme here — because he died in 1760. His son, another William, continued with the works, and Carclew blossomed into an elegant Palladian country home complete with long colonnades terminating in symmetrical pavilions.

The architectural feature of 1916 described Carclew as having a ‘pleasant character’, even if it somewhat haughtily also noted, that it was 'a good example of the classical taste as the Victorians understood it.'

However, it was what lay outside that was said to be the property's crowning glory.

The sheltered position, and Cornwall's sub-tropical climate, proved to be the perfect arena for plant collecting — a passion of Sir Charles Lemon (the first William's grandson).

The third Lemon's wealth meant that he could sponsor Sir Joseph Hooker’s 19th-century, three-year plant hunting expedition to the Himalayas. It was on that expedition that rhododendrons and azaleas were first harvested and brought back to Europe, and Lemon was among the first to establish the extravagant shrubs in British soil.

When Country Life turned up at the door, in 1916, while the house was in the ownership of Lemon ancestors Captain and Lady Tremayne, the colourful, but vigorous plants were said to possess 'so great a girth that a man cannot span their stems.’

The gardens harboured plenty more exotic plants, from all four corners of the globe. Camellias, rare tree-ferns, bamboos and Mexican flame trees all flourished. Cornwall’s eccentric gunnera competition — an informal, seasonal race to see who can grow the largest Gunnera manicata or the now-classified invasive hybrid Gunnera x cryptica — was often won by mammoth-leaved specimens from the estate's grounds

Treymane shared his ancestor’s love of plants, adding vast drifts of Japanese irises to the sides of the two pools in the grounds.

Unlike so many other large properties in this era, Carclew and her Arcadian grounds emerged from the other side of the First World War and the decade that followed relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, this was when things started to go wrong. Very wrong.

At about 2am, on a day in April, 1934, Tremayne woke to find his bedroom full of smoke. He struggled, along with his wife, to escape the fierce flames, even climbing onto the now very hot roof. Thankfully, the couple had installed telephones around the house and a quick call to a housemaid in the basement confirmed that the servant's stairs were currently safe. Everyone escaped with their lives.

Downstairs, Tremayne set to work organising his ‘troops’. (He would later praise his staff for 'working like heroes, paying no attention to their own safety, getting all the children out and all the maids from the attics.’)

Apart from a few Chippendale chairs and a portrait of one of the Lemons, nothing much survived. A Canaletto, a Rembrandt, and other priceless artefacts, were all gobbled up by the fire and everyone from landowner to footman was left with just the clothes they were wearing.

Carclew stood in ruins.

The cause of the fire? It was eventually judged to be the fault of electrical cables, installed around the birth of the 20th century.

There was initial talk of rebuilding, but then came the Second World War. A remaining wing was handed over to American soldiers involved in the D-Day landings and, later, to refugees displaced by the fighting. When the war ended, so did the occupation of Carclew.

The shell of the once-great home still stands today — on private land — and a forest school has been set up in the magnificent grounds.

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A landmark on the arterial Talgarth Road in west London is a terrace of brick and terracotta housefronts with unusually tall windows (Fig 2). This set of eight properties was built in 1890–91, when it enjoyed a pleasant aspect across fields to St Paul’s School, from which it took its original name of St Paul’s Studios. Comprising a large studio with artists’ living accommodation set around a central great room — and renumbered late in the 20th century as part of Talgarth Road — these ‘studio-houses’ were a commercial development for letting, funded by art publisher James Fairless and designed by architect Frederick Wheeler. Mostly occupied by working artists until the First World War, they were later converted into houses, flats and dance studios.

The two illustrated in this article, however, are working studios once again, now owned and occupied by young portrait painters who trained at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy; James Hayes has No 143, and George Clark and Isabella (Bella) Watling No 139. It is wonderful to see the studios used for the purposes for which they were built and they are perfect for artists who work in the sight-size method, where the image and subject are placed side by side and the artist walks away from sitter and canvas to a distance to perceive the whole. In this way, the artist sees a unified image to scale and proportion. The method has been used by masters since the 17th century, including Reynolds, Lawrence and Sargent, yet its origins lie in the practice of Titian, Van Dyck and Velázquez.

Studio-houses were a product of London’s vibrant late-19th-century artistic life, which was underpinned and massively extended by the demands of publishers for prints and illustrations in the global market for English language books and journals. For the first time, being an artist or illustrator was a sound career and practioners’ purpose-built houses consequently became a feature of London. An early cluster was built on the edge of the Holland Park estate; one designed by Philip Webb was built, in 1866, for Val Prinsep, another designed by George Aitchison, for Frederic Leighton (Country Life, February 21, 2024), was completed the same year.

G. F. Watts built himself a house and gallery in the 1870s, on the new Melbury Road, and Richard Norman Shaw designed two memorable studio-houses, in the Queen Anne Revival spirit, on the same road, for Marcus Stone and Luke Fildes. These huge studios would be opened to the respectable public on Show Sunday, the weekend before the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Well-known artists were photographed posing in grand studios so crammed with paintings that they were as much art galleries as working spaces, although the late Andrew Saint (in his book on Shaw) noted that such studios were often more a bid for position than a statement of success.

Smaller buildings aimed at ‘bachelor’ artists soon sprang up around the bigger studios — and these quickly began to accommodate women artists, too. Six brick-built studio-houses, for example, were built in 1878–79 by Arthur Langdale and Co of Brompton around a courtyard on Holland Park Road. Such groups provided the pattern for those erected on Talgarth Road.

The St Paul’s Studios were designed by the highly competent Wheeler, a London-born pupil of Charles Driver. Driver had first trained to be a civil engineer and is best known for the remarkable Cross Ness and Abbey Mills pumping stations associated with Joseph Bazalgette’s development of the Embankment (The legacy, November 19, 2025). By the 1880s, Wheeler had offices in Horsham in West Sussex and Chancery Lane in London. He played a significant role in the development of Streatham, south London, then being built up on the model of the artistic suburb of Bedford Park, and designed several banks in Sussex, as well as a notable Queen Anne Revival convalescent home outside Rustington on the West Sussex coast. In the early 1900s, he also worked for Louise, Duchess of Devonshire, adapting for her a house at No 44, Grosvenor Square.

A confident and artistic designer, Wheeler was well suited to the challenges of creating an ‘artistic’ colony in west London — although the peace of the studios was to be affected by the continuation of the Underground and the opening of a new station at Barons Court. An elevation of St Paul’s Studios and a sample three-storey plan of one of the studio-houses was published in The Builder on March 13, 1891. The details are late-Elizabethan or Jacobean in character (Fig 6), with finials, strapwork friezes under the eaves and mullion transom windows to the lower storeys, as well as bay windows and and four highly decorated arched porches; much of the decorative elements are in a fine buff terracotta. Tall brick chimneys complete the picture.

The studio-houses repeated slight variations of the same plan: the raised basement level contained a kitchen and a bedsitting room (originally intended for a housekeeper or maid); whereas the first floor (or raised ground floor), which was approached up steps from street level, had a sitting room and a bedroom. A well-detailed staircase in fine-grained pine (Fig 4) led up to a glazed inner porch (Fig 5). Beyond was a large studio dominated by the north-light window. A blind system controlled the fall of light. Each studio (30ft long and 22ft wide, with a 20ft-high ceiling) enjoyed two fireplaces, no doubt to keep the artists’ models warm.

St Paul’s Studios were built a few years after a neighbouring studio, Colet House. This was one of the largest studio spaces in London, often sublet to artists who worked on pictures of scale. It contained two studios on the ground floor and an exceptionally large first-floor studio (35ft by 75ft). Colet House is said to have been built for Sir Coutts Lindsay, Bt, founder of the first Grosvenor Gallery on Bond Street, and it was certainly used by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Frank Brangwyn when working on larger-scale works — both artists had studio-houses of their own nearby.

Several well-known artists have lived in St Paul’s Studios over the years. Occupants before 1914 included the Australian-born Impressionist George Grosvenor Thomas; Herbert Sidney, who studied in Antwerp, Belgium, and in Paris, France, at the École des Beaux-Arts; Abraham Altson, who had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris; Miss E. C. Adlington and Gertrude McMurdie Hammond, a well-known book illustrator. William Logsdail lived at No 5, St Paul’s Studios (now No 143, Talgarth Road, currently occupied by Mr Hayes) and had studied in Antwerp and worked for a few years in Venice, Italy — there are examples of his work in both the Royal Collection and Tate Britain. Punch cartoonist Edward Tennyson Reed lived for a time at No 3, St Paul’s Studios — now No 139, Talgarth Road, the studio of Mr Clark and Ms Watling — as did, after Reed, the prolific Dutch illustrator Frédéric de Haenen.

Mr Hayes, who studied in the Cecil Studios from 2003 to 2007, takes enormous pride in No 143, which he has occupied since 2010. The house was partly restored in the 1980s by architect Alan Day, who used the studio as an architect’s office. Mr Day reintroduced William Morris wallpapers to the house, including that in the staircase hall, based on research suggesting the house had been originally decorated by Morris & Co.

The main studio (Fig 1) is a spacious workroom that doubles as an art gallery and great drawing room. Here, the sitter feels they are in a place where art and representation is taken seriously. The walls are painted in a muted green — against which the portraits look especially good (Fig 3) — as does a collection of plaster casts of antique sculpture (Mr Hayes has a large cast of Gaddi Torso from the Uffizi in Florence) and a collection of Hellenistic bronze sculptures and coins. Recently, in this room, he painted Heather Hancock, the first female master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, the former head of the UK’s Armed Forces.

Mr Clark and Ms Watling, who met at the Cecil Studios in 2009 and studied there until 2014, moved into No 139, Talgarth Road in the summer of 2021 and were married in 2022. They share the home with their two children, Audrey and Agnes. Much of the repair work was done by Mr Clark’s father, Andrew Clark, a retired engineer. The couple remain in close touch with Charles Cecil and return to teach in Florence, as well as hosting students for tuition. Ms Watling’s portrait of the Pakistani education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, painted in this room, has recently been unveiled in Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford; Ms Watling was also awarded the second prize for her portrait Zizi in the 2024 Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The Clarks have decorated their studio room in Charleston Gray and off white (Fig 7); hues that are without colour and are similar to the colours Mr Cecil has specially mixed for the studios of his art school in Florence. Deliberately mid-tone, they are suitable for teaching drawing from casts and from life. The room is an excellent backdrop for portraiture, including works by both occupants, alongside a fine portrait of Bishop John Porter, a distinguished Arabic scholar, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

The links to Florence remain strong. Mr Cecil himself has been based in the Tuscan city since 1978 and began teaching in 1983. He founded his eponymous studios in 1991 to help continue the atelier tradition, ‘a historic practice in which a master painter opens a studio to a select group of dedicated students who can work alongside them,’ he says, Mr Cecil runs this with assistant director Sam Good, a former pupil and artist, and has made the Cecil Studios the best place to study the sight-size method today.

Mr Cecil himself studied in the ateliers of R. H. Ives Gammell in Boston and Richard F. Lack in Minneapolis in the US. The author of Twilight of Painting (1946), Gammell was a pivotal figure in reviving atelier training in the mid 20th century and had studied with Boston painter William Paxton. Paxton, in turn, was an alumnus of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and worked in the studio of Dennis Bunker, a friend of Sargent who had painted alongside him.

These links are important to Mr Cecil, who turned 80 last year. His influence on the world of portraiture is widely recognised in the UK and across Europe and he personally supervises the progress of each student, assisted by experienced former students. Central to the atelier training is the discipline of working from Nature without recourse to photography and students are diligently taught the sight-size method.

The Florentine Charles H. Cecil Studios operate over two locations. One of these is the former Chiesa di San Raffaello Archangelo, which was adapted as a studio complex by sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini in the early 19th century. Bartolini left this space to his student Romanelli, whose descendants still live and work on the same premises. The other is a set of purpose-built north-lit painting studios built in the 1870s in the Piazzale Donatello, flanking the English Cemetery. These are all part of the same tradition that produced the Talgarth Road studio-houses in the early 1890s. How remarkable that they are all now linked by painting activity and output of the highest standard recognised by awards, exhibitions and continuing commissions from institutions up and down the country.

This feature originally appeared in the March 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Unglamorously, this Easter weekend exactly coincides with the start of the new tax year. In the sphere of inheritance tax, this brings with it some of the most important changes to the system since the early 1990s. As first announced, the Government’s proposals to cap business and agricultural relief caused huge controversy, but the protests led by farmers won public support and secured important concessions.

The relative success of the farmers, however, has taken the wind out of the sails of another campaigning group that, in many respects, had common cause with them: country-house owners. Their plight will not elicit much political sympathy, particularly in the present state of the world.

In Athena’s view, however, a government with long-term vision would be foolish not to give serious consideration to their situation. Those who maintain country houses are necessarily asset rich and that reasonably makes them an object of high taxation. What they possess, however, often has an additional intrinsic value as heritage and it’s this that the tax system needs to acknowledge more fully.

Expressed simply, a historic house, landscape and a collection are all worth money, but their heritage value is intrinsic and lies in the interconnection of these elements. Break that connection and, individually, they lose much of what makes them important. There is some recognition of this reality through conditional exemption, which offers private owners of important objects, property or land, tax relief in return for reasonable public access.

What’s troubling, however, is that wider financial pressures may increasingly render this scheme redundant if the estates themselves can’t survive. Anecdotally, there are country-house owners who have been hastily redistributing property between family members to avoid the impending tax changes. Others wonder about the purpose of running a property when there is no prospect of passing it on as a viable economic concern. After all, many country-house estates are effectively small family businesses and have accordingly suffered the same sharply rising costs and increased legislative burdens as their peers.

In addition, however, they also face the constraints and costs imposed by operating in historic buildings and landscapes. It’s a situation outlined in a recent report produced by Historic Houses, A Fragile Inheritance. As one owner expressed it to Athena, the income from running their estate and property has remained largely unchanged over the past decade, but the costs have increased by nearly one-third. Country-house owners should not enjoy preferential treatment in their tax affairs, but Athena would argue that they should be taxed — like farmers — in a way that reflects their particular and unusual circumstances. Public access to the heritage they help preserve is a valuable return and a thoughtfully developed tax system could facilitate it.

As things stand, however, the new tax year promises to usher in not, perhaps, a dramatic change, but a slow financial suffocation of some estates. Do we really want that?

Beaudesert Hall (beaudesert meaning ‘beautiful wilderness’) was situated on the southern flank of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and had been in the same family since it had been gifted by Henry VIII to Sir William Paget, in 1546.

Over the years, the hall had, like any home, been modernised, extended and tweaked as it was handed down through the generations. So, therefore, it was only natural that when the Charles Paget, 6th Marquess of Anglesey, inherited the pile in 1905, he deemed it necessary to put his own stamp on things.

He implemented a programme of renovations, redecoration and repairs — as well as bringing the building bang up-to-date with the installation of some new-fangled electricity. And he was on the verge of moving in when disaster struck.

In November 1909, a fire, believed to have been triggered by the newly-installed wiring, took hold in the servant’s quarters. Despite swift action from the local fire brigade, 15 rooms were badly damaged. Luck, however, was, believe it or not, on Paget's side. The weather that night was still, and the property shrouded in fog, which fortuitously stopped the fire spreading further.

You could have forgiven him for calling it quits — especially as he had also inherited the equally-sizeable Plas Newydd on Anglesey at the same time as Beaudesert — but he was determined to turn the latter into his family home.

Paget redoubled his efforts, tasking Captain Harry Lindsay, a relative of his soon-to-be wife Lady Marjorie Manners, with the alterations to the building that would be a nod to the different distinct design eras it had lived through. These included an impressive, oak clad, Great Hall as it would have looked prior to Henry VIII’s 'acquisition’, and a tapestry room featuring a striking new Jacobean-style plasterwork ceiling. There was also to be a Queen Anne-style bedroom, and, in the place of a 19th century Neo-Gothic archway, a beautiful rafter ceiling studded with a carved beam believed to date to the time of Henry VII.

The First World War raged on while these alterations were being made and, when it finally ended, the UK, depleted of both men and money, launching a swingeing taxation system to help regenerate the country.

Suddenly, owning and running two huge estates (and a vast London town house) was no longer a viable option. Paget invited Country Life to record his work at Beaudesert, and then, in 1924, put the property into which he had ploughed so much love and money on the market.

It failed to sell.

Beaudesert was, however, kept in good repair — so much so that in March 1935, Harry Roy was able to entertain more than 325 guests who danced in the oak-panelled long gallery and yellow drawing room until breakfast was served. It was to be the grand old building’s last hurrah. Soon after, the demolition men were invited to bid for the task of dismantling thing.

In a letter to The Lichfield Mercury, dated June 26, 1935, the peer felt compelled to explain his decision to do away with Beaudesert Hall: 'The feeling of my family and myself can be imagined, and my regret at the demolition of the house is increased by the feeling of separation from Staffordshire friends.

‘Unfortunately I have not been able to occupy Beaudesert since 1920. The very heavy burden of taxation, since the war, has made it impossible for owners all over the country to maintain everything as in pre-war days, and many heart-breaking decisions have had to be taken; in some cases it has been possible to preserve houses and beauty spots.

In this case Beaudesert has been offered again and again to every possible public body, colleges, British Red Cross Society, school authorities and others, and in every case it was found to be unsuitable for the purpose.

In 1932 Beaudesert was offered for sale by public auction, but not a single bid was made.

It was after long hesitation and not easily, that I finally agreed to the course which has now been adopted. Yours, ANGLESEY.

P.S.—Although the sale is advertised to take place shortly, it would be possible to take advantage of any practical suggestion by which Beaudesert might be preserved.'

The letter fell on deaf ears — a report in November 1935 states that Birmingham City Council acquired about 3,000 square feet of oak from the 17th century Long Gallery.

The demolition had begun.

Despite its destruction, many parts of the building were salvaged and live on today across the globe, including at St James's Palace, London, and, somewhat more surprisingly, in a (then) new-build home in the Adelaide Hills of southern Australia.

The latter belong to Ursula and Edward Hayward who attended a sale of effects while on their honeymoon. The couple purchased the panelling, doors, windows and hefty cast iron and oak Waterloo Staircase — which they subsequently installed in their new home, Carrick Hill. built their new home, Carrick Hill, around. That property is now a tourist attraction in its own right.

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As the River Avon flows south from Salisbury, it passes a number of historic houses in parkland settings: Longford Castle, Trafalgar House, Hale Park and then Breamore (pronounced ‘Bremmer’). Breamore was important enough in the Anglo-Saxon period to be the site of an unusually large church and during the Middle Ages was owned by a series of great landowners who lived elsewhere. Following the Norman Conquest, it belonged to Baldwin de Redvers, Earl of Devon, who founded a priory of Augustinian canons by the Avon.

Thereafter, the manor belonged to the Courtenay Earls of Devon, until Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, fell victim to Henry VIII’s suspicious mind and was executed in 1538. The estate was held in succession by Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr, then the latter’s second husband Thomas Seymour, until he, too, was executed. In 1579, Elizabeth I gave it to Sir Christopher Hatton and, in 1580, he sold it to Sir William Dodington, the builder of the present house.

Sir William’s family came from Mere in Wiltshire. He prospered through his marriage to Christian, sister of Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, a connection that put him at the heart of the Elizabethan regime. The house, constructed of brick with stone dressings, was probably built in the 1580s. Its main front is E-shaped in plan and the side façades are, by contrast, attractively informal.

A long wing extends back to one side, creating an entrance court to the rear. Altogether, the house is built on a grand scale, but has a frank simplicity with no extraneous ornament. The skyline is crowded with brick chimneys that rise above the gables (Fig 1) and the whole enjoys an Arcadian valley setting, at once spreading and secluded.

Breamore, however, brought no comfort to its builder. A legal dispute with a Hampshire neighbour landed Sir William in prison and, although released through the interest of friends, he was threatened with an action in Star Chamber. On the morning of April 11, 1600, he climbed the steeple of St Sepulchre’s, Holborn, London, and threw himself from the battlements. A suicide note was discovered on his body subscribed ‘Lord save my soul and I will praise thy name’. In it he blamed ‘John Buckley and his fellows’ who ‘by perjury and other bad means hath brought me to this end. God forgive it them and I do’. A ballad describing the episode was suppressed by the authorities and the details of what actually happened are hazy.

Misfortunes pursued his heir, another Sir William, described by one contemporary as a ‘pure, precise gentleman’. In a letter dated 1629, Sir Henry Bourchier reported to Archbishop Usher that one of Sir William’s younger sons ‘being reprehended for some disorderly courses by his mother, drew his sword and ran her twice through, and afterwards, she being dead, gave her many wounds; and had slain his sister at the same time, had he not been prevented’.

He was hanged for murder. Sir William’s eldest son, Herbert, died young, too. According to Thomas Fuller, a prebendary of Salisbury, he bore all this with ‘saint-like patience’, but came to regard his family as cursed for having seized property from the church, to which he generously restored it.

Breamore eventually passed to Sir William’s granddaughter, Anne, who married Robert Greville, Lord Brooke. For a century, the house belonged to this aristocratic family, who rarely went there. There was a fresh start, however, in 1748, when the 8th Lord Brooke sold the estate to George II’s physician, Sir Edward Hulse. His descendants have owned it ever since.

The family came from Hulse, near Middlewich in Cheshire, and Edward Hulse (1631–1711), ‘a person of great skill in the practice of physick’, studied at Leiden and became court physician to the Prince of Orange. He then returned to England to practice. His son, another Edward, followed the same career and became physician-in-ordinary to Queen Anne, George I and George II, who conferred a baronetcy on him in 1739. The present baronet, Sir Michael Hulse, is the 11th.

The 1st Baronet resided at Dartford Heath in Kent; he never lived at Breamore, which he bought for his son, but he is commemorated in the house by a superb pastel portrait by Francis Cotes. He married an heiress, Dorothy Westrow, and portraits of her ancestors line the hall. The Westrow ancestry evidently meant a lot to the family, for, in the mid 19th century, the 6th Baronet named his elder son Edward Hamilton Westrow Hulse and, since then, the heirs have always borne this name. The 2nd Baronet did not pursue medicine and lived as a landed gentleman, although he, too, married an heiress, Hannah Vanderplank, daughter of a Netherlandish merchant.

His heir, yet another Sir Edward, also wed a City heiress, Mary Lethieullier, a descendant of Flemish Protestants who took refuge in England in the early 17th century. Her uncle was the noted connoisseur and antiquary Smart Lethieullier; on his death in 1761, his estate at Aldersbrook in Essex and his collections passed to Mary; some souvenirs of him are still at Breamore. Sir Edward was perhaps overshadowed by his soldier brother Samuel (1747–1837), who, when young, was in the Prince of Wales’s circle and took on the thankless task of being the Prince’s treasurer and receiver-general. He went on to enjoy a distinguished military career, becoming a Field Marshal and Governor of Chelsea Hospital. Many objects relating to him remain in the family collection.

On October 19, 1856, in the time of the 5th Baronet, another Sir Edward, the house burnt down. The wing was undamaged, but the main block was gutted. Sir Edward restored the building with great sensitivity and also doubled the depth of the main block, creating a new entrance façade set back to back with the original Elizabethan frontage. This addition faithfully adopts the style of the original architecture, with a tall porch in the middle and gables to either side. It allowed for the building to be turned back to front with a new door to the rear. Therefore, although visitors normally approach from the south, the drive continues round the house to the court behind. This arrangement gives prominence to several service buildings, including a tall octagonal water tower built in the mid 19th century. Another notable building is the Georgian stable block, which features a hipped roof and pediment carried on Tuscan pilasters (Fig 2).

The porch leads into an entrance hall (Fig 4), which is hung with recent family portraits. To the right is a screen of re-used woodwork and the Inner Hall. The state portrait of George I that hangs here was a gift to his physician, the 1st Baronet. Also on display are Samuel Hulse’s field-marshal’s baton and telescope, and paintings of Napoleon’s victories. Beyond is the main range of the Elizabethan house, which was originally divided up to accommodate a great hall, screens passage and services.

After the 1856 fire, however, these divisions were stripped out to create a single room with the character of a long gallery, running the full length of the building between the two wings (Fig 3). It contains two identical carved stone chimneypieces, one presumably of the 1580s, and is lined with oak panelling. The hall’s decorative plaster ceiling was evidently modelled by hand and the whole scheme looks convincingly Elizabethan, not at all like conventional work of the 1850s: it may represent an early application of Arts-and-Crafts principles by local craftsmen.

There is an impressive collection of furnishings, including two large Flemish tapestries after designs by David Teniers, a magnificent peasant scene by the same artist and several 16th- and 17th-century portraits, many of Dorothy Westrow’s ancestors. Among them is a full-length image of Sir Thomas Coningsby with ‘Crickit a Dwarf’ and Mary, Queen of Scots, in white mourning dress. The dining room, in the wing, has a similar ribbed plaster ceiling and a great stone chimneypiece (Fig 5). Its paintings of game against a landscape background, by Pieter Andries Rysbrack, are part of the large collection of Dutch pictures in the house and there is a remarkable model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that once belonged to Smart Lethieullier.

The Blue Drawing Room has been recently redecorated and the strong blue makes a good background for late-17th- and early-18th-century portraits (Fig 8). These include one by John Riley of the first Dr Edward and others of the 2nd Baronet with his wife, Hannah. The elaborate Dutch marquetry furniture in this room was given by her father. The adjacent West Drawing Room has been painted a warm red to serve as the family’s sitting room and has a fine array of 18th-century portraits and furniture. A painting of young Walter Hawksworth Fawkes is one of the earliest paintings of a cricketer in existence.

Many of the house’s treasures are on the first floor, such as the magnificent English table carpet with a green ground, dated 1614, that hangs above the main stairs (Fig 7). On the landing nearby is a set of 14 paintings, apparently from 18th-century Mexico, representing the racial types of its population. The Blue Bedroom has a Georgian mahogany bed and superb pastel portraits. In the east wing, two rooms are furnished as Tudor bed-rooms, with 16th-century furniture, portraits, textiles, and huge oak bedsteads (Fig 6).

The house stands on a terrace, facing south-east over the valley, with, to the north, a pool garden enclosed by yew hedges. The specimen trees on all sides are one of the great features of the place. To the south, in a grove of cedars and ancient yew trees, is the church, visibly a work of Saxon architecture, with a central belfry. Inside, the south transept arch has a Saxon inscription and a splendid collection of funeral hatchments for successive members of the Hulse family.

Breamore also has the superb Countryside Museum, formed in the 1970s by the 10th Baronet, Sir Edward, who died in 2022. This occupies a group of large purpose-built barns with themed displays. The first building presents rural businesses and crafts, including a cooper’s shop, schoolroom, village shop, a cobbler, blacksmith’s, brewhouse and so on. Further zones have collections of agricultural equipment, tractors, steam engines and machinery of all kinds. The collections were assembled by Sir Edward by purchase or gift, over 50 years or more, and embody a deep and evident love for lost or vanishing rural ways of life. The museum is open on most days; the house has limited opening for guided tours.

A path leads north through an ancient woodland, Breamore Wood, and out onto the chalk downs, where the ancient past reveals itself. There is a linear earthwork, Grims Ditch, and a long tumulus, the Giant’s Grave. About a mile from the house is a little hill covered with yew trees that conceal the Miz Maze, one of eight ancient turf mazes to survive in Britain. The concentric turf walks, cared for by the estate, are laid out in a pattern like the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth.

The downs and the valley, the earthworks and the maze, the Saxon church, the village, the farms and fields, the ancient woodlands, the park and gardens and the grand Elizabethan house together form a landscape of great beauty and historic resonance. It is all superbly maintained today by the Hulse family, the estate team and the village community.

For more information about the house, see the Breamore House website.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Llanvihangel Court, Monmouthshire, The seat of Mrs Attwood-Matthews was originally published in the May 20, 1916, issue of Country Life. It was written by H. Avery Tipping.

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Llanvihangel Court lies four miles north of Abergavenny town, and in medieval times was a part of that important lordship.

Its position at the foot of the picturesque Skirrid, or Holy Mountain of Monmouthshire, its noble seventeenth century avenues of fir and Spanish chestnut, its approach up stately flights of stone steps combine with its own considerable architectural merits to make it a place of distinction and charm.

The house has been subject to many changes and vicissitudes, but its main characteristics are those of the moderate sized manor house of the period that saw the close of Elizabeth's reign and the beginning of that of her successor. The feeling for symmetry was in the ascendant, but the medieval plan of entering the hall at one end behind screens was retained. When the whole of the central portion of the entrance elevation was taken up by the hall there could not be a central entrance door. It was therefore placed in the return side of a little gable set against one of the larger wing gables, and balanced by a similar gable at the other end of the hall.

This arrangement was discussed in the volume of English Homes dealing with this period of our architecture, and among the places cited in illustration Stanton Court in the Cotswolds will be found to have the same central recessed block and two pairs of gables as still compose the north elevation of Llanvihangel Court.

There is also evidence in the masonry of the original position of the door. But the Charles Il owner altered the arrangement to the fashion of his day and placed the door centrally in the hall. Of recent years a porch has been added as a convenience. Otherwise the front has been little altered since the reign of Elizabeth, when we are told that Rhys Morgan rebuilt the Court. That he merely altered and added to an existing fabric is clear from the survival at the back of the house of one or two windows of Henry VIII's time, if not also from the presence here and there in the interior of linenfold panelling. They are interesting reminders of the home of the family whose heiress was mother to Rhys Morgan the rebuilder.

The modern mind, resting upon the fixed surname system as a bedrock principle, is easily bewildered by Welsh medieval genealogies, and therefore no more will be said than that John a PG wilym Jenkin of Wernddu belonged to the same family as the Herberts, who were dominant about Abergavenny, where they still own estates, and of whom Herbert of Raglan, as the ancestor of the Dukes of Beaufort and of the Earls of Pembroke, is the best known.

In Henry VI's time Thomas ap Jenkin, a grandson of John ap Gwilym, held Llanvihangel, which his granddaughter carried to Philip Herbert, a base son of the Earl of Pembroke, to whom, or his successor, their son, William Herbert, acted as steward. His only child married a neighbour, William Morgan of Triley, and it was their son, Rhys, who largely superseded, in the style of his day, the 'older and inferior house' that he inherited.

The whole of the north side and its three gabled return towards the east were rebuilt by him. To the east side a building with two big bays has recently been added in front of the gables, and also a room beyond them to the south. But above the low roof of this room, in a gable facing south, may be seen a three-light window of the Henry VIII type, suggesting that at this point Rhys Morgan allowed the older fabric to remain.

Of such fabric the massive oak framed and slightly cambered ceiling of one of the bedrooms is an example. In Rhys Morgan's time ribbed plaster ceilings were in vogue, and he introduced them as may be seen in another bedroom ceiling. It belongs to the earlier period of such work where the ribs were small mouldings arranged in an involved geometrical pattern with masks, bosses or ornamented discs at the points of radiation.

It is interesting to note the similarity of Rhys Morgan's ceilings with those at Stanton Court, which has just been mentioned as closely resembling Llanvihangel in plan and elevation.

Rhys Morgan was succeeded by his son Anthony, who had married a Northamptonshire heiress and found no use for the Monmouthshire estates.

In I608 he sold both Llanvihangel and Triley, and the former after a few years' ownership by the Earl of Worcester passed by purchase Nicholas Arnold. Above the Henry VIII window already alluded to may be seen a mural sundial. It has the initials N. A. and the date I627, which will mark the time when Nicholas Arnold made alterations to the house he had recently bought. These do not seem to have been considerable.

Colonel Bradney, the present historian of Monmouthshire, tells us that 'the stables appear nearly as old as the house and are larger and more roomy than stables of this date generally are.' As a matter of fact much finish was beginning to be given to stables in Jacobean days. The character of the fine posts and other woodwork features in the Llanvihangel stables are not beyond what we might expect, and are just as likely, judging from their style, to date from the Morgan as from the Arnold occupation.

But Colonel Bradney inclines to assign them to Nicholas Arnold, whom he describes as 'a breeder of horses importing stud horses from the Low Countries.' This may be true, but the authority is not given, and the only member of the family who is well known to have laboured in this field was Nicholas's grandfather, a much more distinguished man.

The Arnolds originally came from the Cardiff region, but members of the family established themselves in Bristol and Gloucester, where they acquired wealth. Thus the manor of Highnam, near the latter city, came to John Arnold at the dissolution of the monasteries, and he had a son: Nicholas, who was of the King's bodyguard in 1539, and was knighted under Edward VI. Favouring the reformers, he fell on evil times in Mary's reign and twice suffered imprisonment. But with Elizabeth's accession came the tide in his affairs, and he was Lord Justice of Ireland in 1564. After that Highnam appears to have been his headquarters, but he often represented the county in Parliament. Of him Harrison, in his contemporary Description of England, says: 'Sir Nicholas Arnold of late hath bred the best horses in England and written of the manner of their production.' We learn from the Dictionary of National Biography that 'no trace of such writings survive,' and then follow the words: 'but he is known as early as 1546 to have been engaged in importing horses from Flanders', which are almost the same as those used by Colonel Bradney, on what authority I know not, in reference to Sir Nicholas's grandson. His uncle was of Highnam, while his father is described as of Llanthony. He himself became of Llanvihangel about the time when he was returned to Parliament in 1626.

It was in the following year that, as we have seen, he set up his sundial, and in I633 he was sheriff. How he comported himself during the Civil War that followed does not appear. Tradition brings the much pressed King to Llanvihangel Court in I645, and therefore a room there is called King Charles' Chamber.

This tradition is unsupported by Symonds' Diary, as published by the Camden Society in 1859. Richard Symonds was a Royalist serving in the cavalry that was with the King, and his antiquarian leanings made him record points of interest in houses and their owners, as well as the actions of troops and the movements of the King.

Thus we find that Charles came from Hereford to Abergavenny on July I, 1645, and went to Raglan on the 3rd. Symonds and also Parry in his Royal Visits to Wales give full and careful itineraries of the King at this period, and only at Raglan did he 'lay' during the three visits he paid in that neighbourhood before he finally moved north on September I4.

Neither author makes any mention of Llanvihangel or of its owner, and yet faith in a royal visit there persists. Mrs Attwood-Mathews writes: "'There is a very large coat of arms of Charles I over the bedroom door where he slept, it was inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, and there is no doubt it was placed there at the time. I have the King's oak bedstead, which is still in the room. A sort of oak cradle used to be at the foot of the bed, and this was his valet's bedstead.'

Nicholas Arnold died in 1665 and was succeeded by his son John, who married one of his Highnam cousins. Like his father, he served as sheriff and parliamentary representative, and much more than his father did he set his mark on his country seat. When he succeeded to Llanvihangel the movement in favour of tree planting after the destruction of the Civil War was already afoot, and John Evelyn was at work on his Sylva.

Moreover, the fashion of immense formal layouts which Le Nôtre was developing in France was reaching England and taking the form of avenues and of lengthy lines of trees flanking wide open grass vistas.

John Morgan caught this spirit with results that have lasted till today. On the north side of the house, stretching out in the Hereford direction, he made such a vista by setting lines of firs wide apart. As this centred with the house, he moved his front door to the middle of the hall and constructed a set of terraces across which lay flagged landings and successive flights of steps as a descent to the carriageway.

The result at the present day is admirable. Whether we stand where the grass begins and look up at the house, or whether we go up to the front door and look down, the pictorial effect is most satisfying. The rise begins with half a dozen segmental steps spreading out their ample semicircle on to the carriageway, the crannies of the risers thick set with Adiantum trichomanes. Then the scene changes to steps confined between a parapet wall broken at each flight by plinths bearing great stone balls.

At the top rises the ruddy grey house of rubble walling with ashlar coigns and window frames, and roofs of mossy stone tiles. From its windows the broad grass vista is seen stretching out towards the hills and guarded by its veteran sentinels.

There are gaps in the ranks and signs of age, occasionally reaching decrepitude, among the survivors, but the combination of dignity and picturesqueness arrests and retains the attention.

A second fir tree avenue lines the carriageway which runs west from the house to where the village lines the high road. This, however, was only the smaller section of the formal planting, for on the higher ground south of the house were set no fewer than seven avenues of Spanish chestnuts, many of which are still in their prime and have reached immense proportions.

So large and gnarled are many of these splendid trees that two and a half centuries appear less than the span of their life, and their setting has been put down to Rhys Morgan in Spanish Armada times. The scheme of planting, however, is of post-restoration character, and therefore it seems right to ascribe them to John Arnold.

Of him two dated traces remain. The one is a lead cistern (or what remains of it) bearing the letters IAM (John and Margaret Arnold) and the year 1673, while the other is a big iron fireback in the hall which dates from twenty-one years later.

Between those two dates John Arnold no doubt was busy with his various alterations and plantings, but he lived to see the eighteenth century open, when his son succeeded him. He was the last male of the family, and his daughters sold the place to Edward Harley.

He was younger brother to Robert Harley, who became Queen Anne's Tory Prime Minister and Earl of Oxford, with special remainder to his brother's line. In 1702 Edward Harley obtained the lucrative office of Auditor of the Imprest, which he retained until his death in 1735. In 1717 a charge of embezzling State funds was brought against him, but he proved that although thirty-six millions had passed through his hands, yet his accounts were correct within three shillings and fourpence mischarged by the inadvertency of a clerk.

Nevertheless, he became a rich man, whose chief home and estates were in Herefordshire, where, as well as at Llanvihangel, he maintained charity schools. His son succeeded his cousin as third Earl of Oxford in 174I, and Llanvihangel was a possession of his grandson, the fifth Earl, when, in 1797, Archdeacon Coxe visited the neighbourhood, making notes for his forthcoming History of Monmouthshire.

Picturesque scenery had then become fashionable, and the agreeable sensations of awe and terror aroused by 'horrid crags' and 'dreadful chasms' were made the most of. Thus we hear little of the house but much of that very charming but not formidable detached hill, the Skirrid, which plays so excellent a part in the views from the park and appears in one of the illustrations. Coxe found — or rather lost — his way to the top on a hot afternoon after a morning excursion, and the tired body reacted on the mind: 'When I looked down from the narrow and desolated ridge, the boundless expanse around and beneath which suddenly burst upon my sight overcame me my spirits almost failed, even curiosity was suspended, and I threw myself exhausted on the ground.' However, in half an hour he had sufficiently recovered to descend: 'I walked across the meadows, along a gradual descent, through fine groves of oaks and Spanish chestnuts to Llanvihangel house, an old mansion belonging to the Earl of Oxford. It was the ancient seat of the Arnold family, and was sold in I722 to auditor Harley, ancestor to the present Earl. It is now inhabited only by a farmer and contains nothing but some old furniture, a few family pictures, and some good impressions of Hogarth's prints. The place is distinguished by avenues of Scots firs, the largest in England. From the grounds near the front of the house the Skyrid presents itself with peculiar effect, the fissure seems like an enormous chasm separating two mountains whose impending and craggy summits vie in height and ruggedness.'

An 'elegant collation' brought by friends and spread on the banks of the Honddy soon enabled the Archdeacon to forget the 'fatigues of the day.'

Fifty years later Mr Cliffe, another book writing visitor, comes this way, and he also is struck by the firs: 'The avenue is the finest of its kind in the kingdom; the firs are not of the common Scotch species, and about 40 years ago the Government offered 10,000l. for them. Of the house he merely tells us that it is 'a remarkable old mansion belonging to the Hon. W. P. Rodney.'

Two years after Coxe's visit the Earl of Oxford had sold Llanvihangel to Hugh Powell, treasurer of St Bartholomew's Hospital, whose family were connected with the parish, and when he died in I821 it passed to his godson, the Mr Rodney just mentioned. In 1003 his grandson parted with it to a neighbour, Mr Attwood-Mathews of Pontrilas Court.

He, however, died before the house, which needed renovation and addition, was ready for occupation. Mrs Attwood-Mathews therefore completed the work begun by her husband, and since then has largely resided at this very venerable and beautifully situated home.

Los Angeles had a good war. Not only did the Californian city become home to the American aviation and munitions industries following the Second World War, but with the heavy throughput of GIs travelling across the Pacific, it gathered a new working population after the conflagration ended, drawn by the work as well as the incredible climate and light of the city they had passed through.

A large number of those who made it back from the horrors elected to stay in Southern California rather than head back east. Among them were a group of musicians returning from service, who determined to build themselves homes together, creating a special community.

That community was the Mutual Housing Association and soon the pool of interested parties rapidly expanded. Crestwood Hills, as it became known, was close to UCLA and was of interest to a new generation of academics: obstetricians and therapists mainly. ‘ They used to say Crestwood Hills was a wonderful place to either raise a family or have a nervous breakdown,’ says the architectural historian and current resident of the development, Cory Buckner. The original members found a large 800-acre site in the very north of Brentwood on the fringes of the Santa Monica Mountains, sitting on a ridge above Kenter Canyon. It had dramatic views and the mountains on its doorstep; though its steep terrain would later introduce significant financial and construction challenges.

How architecture might embed itself in the landscape became central to Crestwood Hills’ identity. After scouting around for architects, the association opted for a joint venture led by A. Quincy Jones, Whitney R. Smith and structural engineer Edgardo Contini. Jones would go on to become a key figure in Californian Modernism, building several Case Study houses and designing Eichler homes, a series of high-quality tract homes, privately sold, across California, which probably brought the values of modernism — use of lightweight modern material; dissolution of barriers between interior and exterior, furniture integrated into partitions — to the highest number of people in the history of the USA thus far. It brought Frank Lloyd Wright’s values of light and substance to groups of houses rather than one-offs. A noble goal.

The success of A. Quincy Jones’ Eichler homes emerged from his experience at Crestwood Hills, which are wonderful in their own right: standardised yet flexible modern house designs that residents could select and adapt. Post-and-beam structures organised on a strict seven-foot module, with open plans, indoor-outdoor living, exposed materials and extensive use of windows. Concrete masonry blocks, plate glass and redwood were left largely unfinished (although later inhabitants painted theirs). They used plywood ingeniously as well, the material of the age, which was used heavily in aircraft manufacture, but Jones was innovating using it in Crestwood’s buildings.

The lessons were hard won and the project had its troubles. Adjacent to affluent areas including Bel Air, Crestwood Hills encountered opposition, including discriminatory deed restrictions imposed during development. The story goes that it was Henry Fonda’s wife who bullied the realtor into inserting a clause to ensure that there would be ‘no Chinese or Blacks’ allowed in the development. These restrictions conflicted sharply with the founders’ values (‘pinko commie’, says Buckner) and caused some members to withdraw, although many stuck around as they believed a Supreme Court judgement would render any such clause null and void, as was the case.

The main problems came when contractors underestimated the complexity of the built-up post-and-beam framing on hillside sites, nestled amid foliage.  The first 30-house phase operated at a loss. The second contractor only got through six houses before he went bankrupt. The architectural result, however, was incredible: homes oriented at varied angles, set on irregular lots, and shielded by privacy walls that created a sense of openness without sacrificing intimacy. Clerestory windows and floating rooflines give the impression that the houses are floating among the trees and each other.

What is so successful about Crestwood is the way in which it balances the need for seclusion and community in a way that shows that American suburbia need not have been the isolating experience it sometimes was. While not all the shared facilities at Crestwood were realised, the park, clubhouse, preschool, and credit union became lasting symbols of the project’s communal spirit. As Buckner says of the original inhabitants, ‘they felt that a moderate-income family should be able to experience architecture the way a wealthy family does — that there’s no reason why good design can’t transfer down all economic strata.’

On March 26, it will have been precisely 300 years since the death of Sir John Vanbrugh, the visionary architect behind buildings such as Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, and Seaton Delaval. He is, without a doubt, one of the most influential ‘surveyors’ (as they were known back then) in British history.

To talk about John, we needed the help of another man called John. The one and only Dr John Goodall, Architectural Editor of Country Life and co-host of the Your Places or Mine Podcast, is among the most qualified minds to talk about all things brick, stone, and mortar, and he’s also just a fun guy to talk to.

We explored the story of Vanbrugh, from his beginnings in Cheshire, his life as a minor revolutionary, political prisoner, playwright, Kit-Cat Club member and architect. To put it simply, he was one of those annoying kids at school who was just quite good at everything.

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As well as the fascinating story of Vanbrugh, we also discuss the recent restoration of Castle Howard, which Dr Goodall has recently written about in the magazine and online. How can you restore a building of that size after it was almost totally destroyed by fire? The answer is quite slowly, and extremely carefully. But, as you can see from the glorious images by Paul Highnam, they have done an exquisite job.

And no conversation about rebuilding a fire-damaged building can exclude a discussion about the future of Clandon Park in Surrey. As the legal, historical and architectural debate about its use rumbles on, Dr Goodall offers a few thoughts on what the National Trust’s decision to leave the interiors mostly unrestored means for conservation.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: John Goodall

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

The announcement in January this year that a Roman villa had been discovered at Margam, outside Port Talbot in Wales, generated a huge amount of publicity.

Athena is always delighted when archaeology and history hit the headlines and in this case the attention was deserved. There was, however, something slightly giddying about the way the discovery was branded.

When the head of the team behind the find (based at Swansea University) dubbed it ‘Port Talbot’s Pompeii’, he was actually making an optimistic assessment of the building’s potential state of preservation in undisturbed historic parkland. The name, however, was enthusiastically parroted by the press as if there was some meaningful comparison between what had been discovered here and a city more than 1,000 miles away that was destroyed in AD79, nearly a century before any villas were even begun in Britannia.

Beyond being unexpected, big and Roman, why does this discovery matter?

It has long been assumed that cultured Roman life in Britannia didn’t extend west much beyond the southeast corner of Wales. In this area, during the early 2nd century, native tribes came to terms with Rome and large towns (civitates) were established at Caerwent and Carmarthen. Villas followed in the wake of these regional capitals, although it is an open question as to who built them. Some may have been created by the descendants of the pre-Conquest ruling class who adopted Roman habits, others by senior bureaucrats or even absentee landlords.

The change brought with it a dramatic architectural shift illustrated in 1970s excavations at Whitton, Glamorgan. Here, native Iron Age round huts were replaced from the mid 2nd century by buildings on rectilinear foundations and, eventually, a villa. Across Britannia, such buildings grew in scale into the 4th century, a period of particular prosperity.

The new villa at Margam doesn’t promise fundamentally to change this story: it’s in southern Wales, has a plan that implies occupation through to the 4th century and is only 15 miles from its chief rival in scale, the villa at Llantwit Major. In common with this site, it likewise possesses the curiosity of a large freestanding, aisled hall of uncertain function. Otherwise, its real interest is arguably contextual. Margam Mountain, the backdrop to the site, is studded with Bronze Age funerary cairns, clear evidence of human occupation. A superb collection of stone sculpture suggests that, from the 6th century, this was an important early Christian site. That, in turn, may explain why a major Cistercian abbey was established here in 1147. At the Dissolution in 1536, this became the residence of the Mansel family, who built the 1830s house there now.

The villa plugs a gap in this chronology and perhaps links these phases of occupation together — a tribal estate becoming in sequence Roman, ecclesiastical, monastic and familial. If so, it is a staggering reminder of how remote history in Britain can almost invisibly shape the modern landscape.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.