Tidmington House, Warwickshire (Image: Philip Halling/Geograph)
With sad co-incidence, having recently posted about how owners respond to fires in country houses, news comes through that Tidmington House in Warwickshire was badly damaged whilst undergoing renovations.
Tidmington was built in the early 17th-century but was re-fronted in the 18th-century giving it a pleasing and elegant facade, which is visible from the road. Distinctive gables top a neat front which successfully mixes Elizabethan elements with the classical. The recessed central section runs from a smaller middle gable featuring a Diocletian (or thermal) window, above a first floor tripartite Venetian window, sometimes known as Palladian or Serlian after the two architects most associated with popularising it, with finally the two wings being joined by a Tuscan colonnade. Two 1-bay pavilions extend to the left and right, providing a clever balance to the height of the main house.
The grade-II* listed house was once the home of Thomas Beecham, 2nd son of the famous conductor, before being put up for sale in 2009 for £3.95m by the owners who had moved there in 1988. The house was then given a glowing write-up in The Times by Marcus Binney who relished the bold use of colour; the sky-blue library, the jade green dining room – but I wonder if the bold colours in the house contributed to the situation as it was during renovations by the new owners that the fire started.
The blaze is reported to have badly damaged the first floor where the fire started and also part of the ground floor but hopefully a majority of the 8,500 sq ft house will have been spared from the flames – though the inevitable smoke and water damage will have spread beyond the immediate blaze. Again, it shows that insurance companies are right to demand to be told when works are taking place as it is so often during renovations when these fires seem to break out – please don’t let this be another workman being careless with a blow-torch.
Firbeck Hall, Yorkshire (Image: Paul Eggleston/English Heritage)
Some houses languish for years slowly deteriorating, much to the annoyance of interested locals who care about their architectural heritage. For some houses, the obstacle in the way can sometimes be a difficult owner, for others it’s just the sheer scale of the job. Certainly falling into the latter category is Firbeck Hall near Rotherham in South Yorkshire; once palatial home, then a country club, a hospital, and now a cause for serious concern.
Firbeck Hall was originally built in 1594 for William West, a wealthy lawyer who was also connected between 1580 to 1594 to Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury. After his death in 1598 it passed through various branches of the family via inheritance until bought by Henry Gally in the late 18th-century. It was his son, Henry Gally-Knight, who, in 1820, substantially remodelled and extended Firbeck in the Elizabethan style we see today. Sold in the mid-19th-century it passed through the Ecclesiastical Commissioners who sold it to Mrs Miles of Bristol who left it to the Jebb family who remained there until 1909 when it was put up for sale. The early 20th-century was a particularly hard time for country house owners with falling rental and agricultural income affecting all landowners but particularly those caring for the architectural extravagances of previous owners.
Firbeck Hall was badly damaged by fire in 1924 but it’s fortunes improved when it was eventually sold in 1934 to businessman Cyril Nicholson who invested £80,000 (approx £4m – 2008 values) who created the premier country club in the nation, visited by royalty and celebrities. World War II put an end to the gilded lifestyle and it became a hospital in 1943, a role it was to fulfil until c.1990 when it eventually closed.
Since then the house has deteriorated significantly – despite it’s grade-II listing it has suffered from lead theft from the roofs, neglect, and a series of failed plans to rescue what is still one of the largest houses in the area with over 200 rooms. It’s this last fact which is the root cause of the difficulties with any plans for conversion and restoration requiring significant financial resources which banks are unwilling to provide in these tough economic times. Too large for private solutions, the house is also probably too large for our stretched national heritage organisations to take on (such as English Heritage did with Apethorpe Hall, Northamptonshire) – especially as the institutional use has degraded the interior.
The house was bought by a local construction firm in 1996 but little seemed to happen apart from further thefts and vandalism and with little reaction initially from Rotherham Council and active interest from a local conservation group, the ‘Friends of Firbeck Hall‘. However, a major theft in 2005 prompted a complete change of heart from the owner who forged links with a new conservation officer leading to new plans for conversion, active security and some remedial restoration works. Although progress was slow, at least it was progress – until July 2009 when a fire broke out during works on the roof causing serious damage. More bad news followed when the construction firm went into liquidation in May 2010 – joining the ranks of developers with grand plans who have been beaten by the scale of the task, as seen at Gwrych Castle in Wales.
There does seem to be a gap in the provision of solutions for larger houses where private initiatives are insufficient. A more active local conservation department may have slowed the decay in the early stages but the longer houses of this size continue to be unused the greater the cost of restoration, reducing the chances that they can be saved. Hopefully there is some hope for Firbeck Hall as the house was sold again in July 2010 – but as yet there’s no news as to future plans, or more importantly, how they will be financed.
There is a long tradition of replacing country houses going back hundreds of years ever since the first non-fortified mansions were built in the early Tudor period. Since 1974 when the V&A exhibition ‘The Destruction of the Country House’ did so much to highlight the hundreds which had already been lost across the UK and particularly in England the presumption has rightly been against the demolition of country houses – a position which this blog very firmly supports. Yet to stop the replacement entirely could be seen as preventing the improvement of existing estates and seems to presume that no modern architect could match the skill of those who went before. The case of Parkwood House in Surrey could be a useful case study in showing that replacement can be ‘creative destruction’.
Since 1800, of the nearly 1,800 English country houses which have been lost, over 150 have been replaced by a new house. In the austere times of the post-WWII era, the new house was often smaller and easier to manage. However, before 1930, houses which were demolished were often replaced by much larger houses to reflect the newly established status of the modern captains of industry and finance or to mark an inheritance.
Fonthill Splendens, Wiltshire (Image: RIBA)
This process of renewal could strike again and again – I think the record is held by the Fonthill estate in Wiltshire which has had seven principal houses of varying sizes including the infamous Fonthill Abbey which replaced the superb Fonthill Splendens. James Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey is widely regarded as one of the most interesting (if ultimately unsuccessful) houses ever built in the UK – yet its creation led to the destruction of the old house. Do we deny country house architects the ability to develop and improve just to preserve every older country house regardless of its merits? Is it worse to stagnate estates with unsuitable (or unsightly) houses or must new houses only be built where a house has already been lost or on greenfield sites?
Parkwood House in Surrey is unlisted – and probably rightly so. Built in the late nineteenth-century, it is, in the words of the architects of the new house “…an unremarkable and diluted essay in the ‘Old English’ or ‘Arts and Crafts’ style of the time” – but of course they would say that. However, looking at it architecturally, there does seem little to recommend it – a rambling house, pebble-dashed, with an unexciting entrance front with an only slightly more interesting garden front. The house is not connected with any noted architect, nor any particularly notable family (the only one of interest is the Australian 1st Baron Ballieu who was living there in the 1950s). The house then became the Rank Hovis conference and training centre with all that damage that entails during institutional conversion.
Planning permission was originally submitted in September 2007 and approved in November 2007 – a remarkably quick approval which might indicate that the planners had few qualms about the loss of the house. In fact it might be said that Parkwood is simply a big house a countryside setting – and ‘big’ does not automatically mean it is of merit. However, if the new house designed by the eminent Robert Adam Architects was not of such a high quality would the presumption fall on the side of retaining the old house? The new house is an elegant essay in the use of the Palladian vocabulary to create a design which obviously provides the space and comfort that someone who would live in such a house would demand but is also architecturally interesting. This is no mere cobbling together of a few weak ideas – this is a house which would rightly enter the list of good country houses in Surrey. Robert Adam Architects are one of the leading practices in the country working in the Classical style and have completed other similar projects such as this house in Surrey which also replaced an earlier country house or this house in Sussex.
So if we can be confident that the new house would be high quality replacement is it justified to demolish the existing house? In this case, as the earlier property is so unremarkable it would seem that the 91-acre estate would be better served through the keeping alive of the tradition of country house replacement – but this can only be justified where the original house is unlisted and of a poor design and the new house would be of the highest quality. Demanding the destruction of one house to provide another has a long tradition but is a very risky path and any such application must be open closely scrutinised to ensure that we are not simply throwing away architecturally interesting houses just to build hideous ‘McMansions‘ where bigger is automatically assumed to be better.
An article in the Sunday Times Home section (11 June 2010) includes two houses featured on this blog; one recently and one back in November 2009. The story this week exposes that both are for sale as some of the grandest repossessions in the country with lenders forcing the sale.
Each of these houses when bought was probably the realisation of an aspiration many have to own a grand country house. Yet, what goes up can come down and each owner has now been forced out of their dream. The first house, Sheriff Hutton Hall in Yorkshire is a grade-I listed gem surrounded by 170-acres and indeed featured on this blog entitled ‘If I won the lottery…‘. Originally built in the early 1600s as a hunting lodge before being remodelled in a lighter brick in 1732. The outbuildings were constructed using quantities of stone and panelling from nearby Sheriff Hutton Castle, it also features richly decorated ceilings with plasterwork by John Burridge and Francis Gunby, who is also thought to have worked on the Dining Room at Temple Newsam in Leeds.
Sheriff Hutton Hall was sold in 1998 and became the northern branch of the East 15 acting school. Today however, despite strenuous efforts by the owner, a secondary lender has called in their loan forcing the sale. Originally for sale, through Savills, at offers over £5m (nearer £6m was apparently hoped for) the price has now dropped to £4.5m.
The second property, Apartment One in Wardour Castle, Wiltshire, was only launched in Country Life magazine a few weeks ago and was featured here with the idea that it might be used as a starting point for the conversion of the house back to a single home (‘Conversion reversion: Wardour Castle‘). Yet it now appears that it was the original project to convert this Georgian gem that has caused the current vendor’s difficulties. The house, designed by James Paine, was built in the 1770s for the eighth Baron Arundell and was (and in some ways still is) the grandest and largest house of it’s era in Wiltshire.
After use as a school for thirty years until 1990 it had an uncertain future. Nigel Tuersley then bought the grade-I listed house for £1m in 1992 and decided to convert the house into ten large apartments with Nigel retaining the largest in the centre of the house for himself. However with property boom turning to bust the bank was unwilling to continue funding the project. This first manifested itself when the same apartment, all 23,000 sq ft of it, was put on the market for £7m in 2008 – possibly a bit ambitious even at the time. With the contents now removed (not that you can really tell as the interior was designed by the famous Minimalist architect John Pawson) the apartment now waits for someone with a more reasonable £2.75m through Strutt & Parker.
The house is another in a small but sadly growing list of ‘posh repossessions’ (those valued at over £1m) which show that dreams, however big, can still be brought down and that perhaps the hardest part of reaching the top is staying there.
One of the greatest of the UK’s country house architects was Sir Edwin Lutyens – a man with undoubted talent who was also able to use thoroughly modern techniques of collaboration and media exposure to boost his career and win business. His main media connection was the tireless promotion of his work by Country Life magazine which was, in no small part, due to his close friendship with the founder and editor Edward Hudson. So when Hudson needed to restore and modernise a manor house he’d bought it was inevitable who he would call on. Plumpton Place in Sussex is now considered to be one of Lutyens’ best country houses and it’s for sale.
Lutyens (b. 1869 – d. 1944) was a master at the creation of houses which evoked what many would have in their minds as the ‘ideal’ country house. He was able to marry the romanticism of the Arts & Crafts movement to his own clear ideas as to how a house should look both inside and out. A strong proponent of using local materials he, more importantly, was able to use them in innovative ways which made his houses distinctive.
A classic example of this was his use of chalk at Marsh Court in Hampshire which gave this house a brilliant white appearance, and which contrasted with small tiles of knapped flint set into the walls and the red-brick chimneys. Marsh Court (finished in 1904 and for sale in 2007 for around £13m) was the last of Lutyens’ ‘Tudor’ style houses but it would never be considered an old house – again showing his genius of matching local materials with an assured architectural design.
Much of Lutyens’ fame can be attributed to the unstinting support he received from Edward Hudson who had cleverly exploited the growing urban middle-classes interest in a nostalgic view of ‘olde’ England and the country lifestyle. Founded in 1897 it chronicled not only the best of the grand old country seats but also sought to keep the tradition alive at a time when the lifestyle was beginning to come under threat. One of his writers was the renowned garden designer Gertrude Jekyll who had met Lutyens in 1889 and had collaborated with him to create some of the best regarded house-and-garden compositions in the country. Jeykll introduced Lutyens to Edward Hudson in 1899 thus creating a life-long friendship between the two. To Hudson, Lutyens’ ability to create these idealistic visions of country life were the perfect material for his magazine. Coupled with the extensive use of their distinctive, high-quality black & white photos it provided an unrivalled opportunity for Lutyens to built fame with the middle-classes but also advertise his talents to the aspirational wealthy or the existing gentry.
Hudson was a man to put his money where his magazine was and commissioned Lutyens to work on three houses; Deanery Gardens, Lindisfarne Castle and Plumpton Place – all now considered to be Lutyens’ best work. Hudson had bought Plumpton, a derelict, moated manor house, in 1928 for £3,300, to be used as a weekend retreat and a place to entertain. In some ways Lutyens’ work there was a surprising contrast to the grand Classical-style banks and corporate work he was engaged with in London and elsewhere. Lutyens created a new route to the house which used a theatrical sense of surprise to hide the house except for glimpses through arches and trees. Inside the most notable addition was that of a music room with huge, almost mullioned, windows with small panes of glasses set into wooden frames rather than the then fashionable steel, flooding the room with light.
The house was bought in 1983 for £800,000 by an American venture capitalist called Tom Perkins who has since lavished ‘millions’ on careful restoration. So if you have £8m, this is a rare opportunity to live in a genuine Lutyens masterpiece which has played its own part in shaping our national impression as to what a country house should look like.
The Country Seat 