The National Trust has just made it easier to visit their many properties with the launch of a new app for the iPhone and has announced it will be free entry during their ‘Bonus Time Weekend‘ on 20/21 March 2010.
The free application not only gives information about all the National Trust’s 350-plus properties and 600,000 acres of countryside but also other local attractions, routes and stop-offs. Using location awareness, the app will let you know what properties are within 20-, 30-, and 40-miles of your current position but you can also just browse a complete list of all properties.
So how best to use their app? Well, if you’re not one of their 3.8m members already, this coming weekend – 20/21 March – you can use this voucher to gain free entry to any of their properties which you would normally have to pay for. See the full list of participating venues to see what’s close to you.
Kiddington Manor, Oxfordshire (Image: Country Life)
After many viewings and some speculation, the Sunday Times is reporting that Kiddington Hall has finally been sold for £15m to Jemima Goldsmith, the wealthy socialite. The grade-II listed house, originally built in 1673 but largely rebuilt to designs by Sir Charles Barry, comes with 466-acres of gardens and parkland designed by ‘Capability’ Brown. The Sunday Times quotes a ‘property source’ as saying “It was a romance. She just fell in love with it.”.
The sale was ordered by the court to fund the divorce settlement of the owner, Erik Maurice Robson, who needed to raise £8m to provide for his ex-wife (for a detailed estimation of the likely proceeds see the comments on a previous post: ‘The economics of selling a country house‘). The estate, described as a ‘jewel in the heart of Oxfordshire’, was one of the most important estates to be launched onto the market last year as rarely do prime estates with a manageable house, fine gardens and a productive estate, come up for sale in the prime Home Counties and this was reflected in the original asking price of £42m for the entire 2,000-acres and house.
However, considering Jemima’s previous successful forays into property development, is Kiddington Hall to be a family home or will she take the advice of some who say that if she spends a couple of million on refurbishment the property could be worth £20m? It will certainly be one to watch as if it is relaunched in a year or two, it will provide a useful barometer as to the recovery of prime country property.
The sale of the main house will also mean that the sale of the remainder of the estate, encompassing 1,600-acres plus several farms and houses can proceed. These sales were contingent on the main sale as without the sale of the main house the rest of the estate could not be sold. The Sunday Times is reporting that Alec Reed, founder of the Reed recruitment agency, is the purchaser.
The modern era has, in many ways, not been kind to our country houses. Faced with massive social changes in the early part of the 20th-century staff became harder to find leading to reduced maintainence. Often this started a spiral of decline which led to the demolition of hundreds of our largest and finest country houses. Even today, faced with the costs of conservation standard repairs, it can be a struggle for owners to keep their houses looking at their best. This is why the recently completed £14m restoration of possibly England’s finest country house, Chatsworth, is such an achievement.
Chatsworth House exemplifies the best in the fine tradition of the development of our country houses. Passed down through generations of the Dukes of Devonshire, the south and east fronts of the house we see today were built for the 1st Duke by the architect William Talman in 1696 in a grand Baroque style around the origianal Elizabethan courtyard. The west and west fronts are thought to be the work of another great architect Thomas Archer, with further work in the 19th-century by Jeffry Wyattville to modernise the house for the 6th Duke. Within the fine exterior the Devonshires also had acquired one of the finest art collections in the world. Unfortunately many have been sold off in the 20-th century to meet the rapacious demands of death duties but the house still holds works by some of the finest artists of the day.
With its spectacular interiors, grand exteriors and palatial grounds, the responsibilities are immense for the 12th Duke. Happily for this wonderful example of the glory of the English country house, the wealth of the Devonshires allows them to maintain the house in a way many other owners can only dream of, and is allied with his own determination to ensure that the house and estate is maintained in the best possible condition. Considering the ravages that economics and circumstance have visited on so many of our houses, it’s a remarkable testament to the care of the Devonshires that this house looks as fine as it does, as the covers come off and the house opens again to the curious public this weekend for another season.
When the developers FM Developments went into administration in 2009, it put in jeopardy a huge development scheme which was to fund the restoration of the historic Ury House. The size of Ury House meant that any scheme was going to have to be ambitious to provide sufficient funding and this one involved the building of 230 homes and the creation of a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. The developers had been praised for consulting with local residents and had the full support of the council for bringing jobs and no small measure of glamour to Stonehaven. Now, a year after the collapse, it’s still not clear if the scheme will proceed at all, leaving the spectacular ruins of Ury House at further risk of decline.
The first house had burnt down in 1645, and the second house was subsequently completely rebuilt as the Ury House we see today in 1855 for Alexander Baird in a fine Elizabethan style by the architect John Baird. Baird was one of the most successful of the architects working at this time even if he rarely followed fashion. His work at Ury was a continuation of the style of Wilkins and Burns they had developed 40 years earlier but was of a high quality which is still visible even today in the shell of the house. As a first stage of the work of the restoration, extensive scaffolding had been erected around the house in January 2009.
The proposals for redevelopment of the 1,500-acre estate included the conversion of the house into nine townhouses. Unlike in many other cases of ‘enabling development’ where the setting of the house is compromised through the encroachment of the housing, the plan put forward placed the residential estate well to the east of the house, thus protecting it. With the bankruptcy of FM Developments these plans have been thrown into doubt and local planning officers are now working on the assumption that the development will not go ahead – despite local councillors being determined to resurrect the scheme. Unfortunately the danger is now that another, less sympathetic, developer will take on the project but may try to cram more houses in or extend the area of the estate taken for housing. This would be a real shame. Although the ideal but unlikely outcome would be the restoration of the house as a single family home, this project had developed as a good example of enabling development practiced in the right way, with sensitive restoration of the main house, protection of the setting of the house, and productive use of the estate.
Rempstone Hall, Leicestershire (Image: Country Life)
In the early part of the 20th-century one option for a country house to avoid demolition was to be converted to institutional use. In this way, many houses became schools, hospitals or offices, but also some became religious institutions – for example, in the 1940s and 50s, Gloucestershire lost seven houses but twenty-two were converted to institutional use. Now with property prices rising but membership of convents falling, houses used for holy purposes are now being sold – and could once again be homes. Rempstone Hall in Leicestershire, currently the Holy Cross Convent, is on the market for £2.5m, as the nuns move to a purpose-built home nearby.
Rempstone Hall is a classically beautiful Georgian red-brick house, originally built in 1792 for William Gregory Williams, a major local landowner. Various families passed though the house usually keeping it as a secondary house to much grander seats elsewhere. By the beginning of the 20th-century it was unoccupied as probably, as with many other houses, at risk of demolition as the houses became surplus to requirements and a drain on finances already under pressure. Rempstone Hall was saved in 1909 when P.W. Carr moved in and made significant additions including a new north wing and a fine stable block before selling it in 1920 to the Derbyshire family from whom the Convent bought it in 1979 for just £110,000.
During their time at Rempstone, the nuns have removed the exterior stucco to expose the warm red-bricks giving the house a bold appearance, the two red blocks framing an elegant loggia which faces the gently sloping lawn. At 21,000sqft this is undeniably a large house with 20 bedrooms, a large entrance hall with possibly Jacobean staircase, a sizable chapel and many other rooms. One downside of institutional use is the rather functional decor and Rempstone is no exception, with lino, acres of red carpet and various partitions which the new owner would need to remove; total renovation costs are estimated to be in the region of £500,000.
This fine and beautiful house, well-located in the Midlands, with 60-acres and several estate buildings, cries out for someone with taste to restore this house back to being a family home – which is helpfully the outcome favoured by the local planners.
The Country Seat 