Hagley Hall, Worcestershire (Image: Hagley Hall website)
When the listed building restrictions were originally introduced the compensation for not being to do exactly as you wished with your house was that the government would provide grants towards maintainence. Obviously successive governments have seen these funds as an easy target when seeking cost cuts and so despite the legitimate limits on changes still being enforced, the cost of the work was now largely borne by the owner.
So the news that English Heritage are atleast providing matched funding to the tune of £210,000 for much needed repairs and conservation work to the beautiful Hagley Hall in Worcestershire is to be very much welcomed. Now, if only they could perhaps prise open the coffers of the lottery funds to provide further grants we might actually be able to claim that we truly support our built heritage.
Launched this week in Country Life magazine is the stunning Sheriff Hutton Park, in Yorkshire. This is a quintessential English country estate: grade-I listed house with 10 bedrooms, farm, 200 acres, lake, and parkland. The house, which dates from 1730, is in need of some modernisation but retains many of the original architectural features. So if you have in excess of £5m available this could be the perfect estate for someone who wants the benefits of an important, but manageable house, combined with the opportunity to add your own choice of (architecturally sensitive) interior.
There are always options for those who have the sensitivity to own an interesting house rather than a simply expensive one.
Shurland Hall (Image: Jackson-Stops)
Shurland Hall, Eastchurch – Kent
Shurland Hall was the gatehouse to a once impressive and important house built between 1510 and 1518 by Sir Thomas Cheyne and visited by Henry VIII in 1532 but now demolished. The final residents of the house were troops billeted there during WWI who did enough damage to ensure that it was uninhabitable. In 1996, the local council spent £200,000 to install supportive scaffolding to arrest the deterioration in the structure. In 2006, a further grant of £300,000 was made to restore the facade and roof and this work has now been completed by the Spitalfields Trust. This beautiful Grade-II* building is now for sale via Jackson-Stops for offers in excess of £2,000,000 – hopefully to someone who can complete the restoration sympathetically.
Grade-I listed Clifton Hall shot into the headlines in September 2008 when the owner walked away from the house and returned it to the mortgage company claiming that he and his family had been driven out by ghosts (‘Spooked businessman flees ‘haunted’ mansion‘). The house includes 10-bedrooms, 7 receptions, large cellars, 2.5-acres of grounds along with voices, knocks, apparitions and blood spots appearing on bed-linen. If you don’t believe in ghosts then this house could be an absolute bargain; an advert in the Home section of the Sunday Times (15 November 2009) lists the price as £2.5m but on the agents website it’s down to £1.5m. So pack your holy water and book a viewing.
Property details: ‘Clifton Hall‘ [FHP Living] (interesting that none of the big agencies have taken this instruction…)
The 7th Annual Georgian Group Architectural Awards have again highlighted that there are still those who will take on a neglected house and breathe new life into it. Of particular interest is the winner of the ‘Restoration of a Georgian Country House‘ category, Cairness House in Aberdeenshire.
This interesting and elegant house was originally built in the 1790s as the centrepiece of a 9000-acre estate by the architect James Playfair for Charles Gordon. The house remained with the family until 1938 after which it unfortunately experience a prolonged period of decline over the next 70 years including use as a farmhouse and even bedsits, and was riddled with dry rot. Julio Soriano-Ruiz and Khalil Hafiz Khairallah are to be loudly applauded for showing that these houses can be restored and that the excuses of the developers, whose claims of dry rot has resulted in the demolition of other houses up and down the country, should never be accepted at face value.
Lord and Lady Gerald Fitzalan Howard of Carlton Towers had hoped to raise £1m to pay for repairs to his family home through the sale of silverware, furniture and paintings from the Towers. Whilst it’s always sad when the contents of a house are sold to fund repairs, thankfully, the sale went better than expected and raised over £2m which will hopefully secure the future of one of the most interesting Gothic houses of the North East.
The Country Seat 