Discover English country house
Discovering an English country house is generally accepted as a large house or mansion, once in the ownership of an individual who also usually owned another great house in town allowing one to spend time in the country and in the city. Country houses and stately homes are sometimes confused—while a country house is always in the country, a stately home can also be in a town. Apsley House, built for the Duke of Wellington at the corner of Hyde Park (‘No. 1, London’ it was called), is one example. Other country houses such as Ascott in Buckinghamshire were deliberately designed not to be stately, and to harmonise with the landscape, while some of the great houses such as Kedleston Hall and Holkham Hall were built as “power houses” to impress and dominate the landscape, and were certainly intended to be “stately homes”. Today many former “stately homes”, while still country houses, are far from stately and most certainly not homes.
The country house was not only a weekend retreat for aristocrats, but also often a full time residence for the minor gentry who were a central node in the “squirearchy” that ruled Britain until the Reform Act 1832 (as documented in The Purefoy Letters, 1735-53 by L G Mitchell). Even some of the formal business of the shire was transacted in the Hall.
Evolution
The country houses of England have evolved over the last 500 years. Before this time larger houses were more often than not fortified, reflecting the position of their owners as feudal lords, de facto overlords of their manor. The Tudor period of stability in the country saw the first of the large unfortified mansions. Henry VIII’s policy of the Dissolution of the Monasteries saw many former ecclesiastical properties turned over to the King’s favourites, who then converted them into private country houses. Woburn Abbey, Forde Abbey and many other mansions with Abbey or Priory in their name often date from this period as private houses. Other terms used in the name of houses to describe their origin or importance include Palace, Castle, Court, Hall, Mansion, Park, House, Manor, Place and Tower.
It was during the later half of the reign of Elizabeth I and her successor James I that the first architect designed mansions, thought of today as epitomising the English country house, and began to make their appearance. Burghley House, Longleat House, and Hatfield House are perhaps amongst the most well known. Hatfield House was one of the first houses in England to show the Italianate influences of the renaissance, which was eventually to see the end of the hinting-at-castle-architecture “turrets and towers” Gothic style. By the reign of Charles I, Inigo Jones and his form of Palladianism had changed the face of British domestic architecture completely. While there were later various Gothic Revival styles, the Palladian style in various forms, interrupted briefly by baroque, was to predominate until the second half of the 18th century when, influenced by ancient Greek styles, it gradually evolved into the neoclassicism championed by such architects as Robert Adam.
Some of the best known of England’s country house(s) tend to have been built by one architect at one particular time: Montacute House, Chatsworth House, and Blenheim Palace are examples. It is interesting that while the latter two are ducal palaces, Montacute, although built by a Master of the Rolls to Queen Elizabeth I, spent the next 400 years in the occupation of his descendants who were Gentry without a London townhouse, rather than aristocracy. They finally ran out of funds in the early 20th century.
However, the vast majority of the lesser-known English country houses, often owned by both gentry and aristocracy, are an evolution of one or more styles with facades and wings in various styles in a mixture of high architecture, often as interpreted by a local architect or surveyor and determined by practicality as much as the whims of architectural taste. An example might be Brympton d’Evercy in Somerset, a house of many periods that is unified architecturally by the continuing use of the same mellow local Ham Hill stone.
The fashionable William Kent redesigned Rousham House only to have it quickly and drastically altered to accommodate space for the owner’s twelve children. Canons Ashby, home to poet John Dryden’s family, exemplifies this: a medieval farmhouse enlarged in the Tudor era around a courtyard, given grandiose plaster ceilings in the Stewart period and then given Georgian facades in the 18th century. The whole is a glorious mismatch of styles and fashions which seamlessly blend together—this could be called the true English country house. Wilton House, one of England’s grandest houses, is in a remarkably similar vein; although, while the Drydens, mere squires, at Canons Ashby employed a local architect, at Wilton the mighty Earls of Pembroke employed the finest architects of the day: first Holbein, 150 years later Inigo Jones, and then Wyatt followed by Chambers. Each employed a different style of architecture, seemingly unaware of the design of the wing around the next corner. These varying “improvements”, often criticised at the time, today are the qualities which make English country houses unique. Scarcely anywhere else in the world would an elite class have allowed, or indeed pursued, such an indifference to style.
