Wotton House (Buckinghamshire)
Wotton House , or Wotton is a country house in the village of Wotton Underwood in the English county of Buckinghamshire . The appearance of the house built between 1704 and 1714 in the English Baroque style resembles that of the contemporary Buckingham House . English Heritage has listed the building as a Grade I Historic Building.
The park was laid out by landscape architects George London and Henry Wise ; it contains a formal parterre and a double elm tree alley that leads down to the lake. 50 years later, William Pitt the Elder and Capability Brown reworked the park, creating a pleasure ground of 80 hectares with two lakes.
After the main house was destroyed by fire in 1820, the owner, Richard Grenville, 2nd Marquess of Buckingham , later 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, commissioned John Soane to rebuild. After the 3rd Duke of Buckingham, the last direct male heir to Grenville, died in 1889, the house was given to a number of tenants and in 1929 Major Michael Beaumont bought it and had it renovated by architect Arthur Stanley George Butler , all of which Soane detailing such as B. the three-story triforium , were covered. In 1947 Beaumont sold the property to the Merchant Venturers of Bristol , who divided the property into small plots and rented the main house to two boys' schools. By 1957 the house was in ruins and was about to be demolished, but then Elaine Brunner bought it and, with the help of architect Donald Insall, had most of the details restored by Soane.
The South Pavilion (the former Remise) was sold separately in 1947. The list of its owners is illustrious, e.g. B. Sir Arthur Bryant and Sir John Gielgud ; the current owners are Tony and Cherie Blair .
History of the house
There was a mansion at Wotton Underwood since the 12th century , owned by the Grenville family who accompanied William the Conqueror . In 1704 Richard Grenville (1644-?) Had Wotton House built on a new estate on a mound over a natural lake. The architecture was similar to that of Buckingham House, which was built in London at the same time and later renamed Buckingham Palace . The architect is unknown, but Sir Howard Colvin thinks it could have been John Fitch ; John Millar, however, suspects it could be from Elizabeth Wilbraham .
In 1749 Richard Grenville , the older brother of George Grenville (Prime Minister from 1763 to 1765), through his wife Hester , sister of Viscount Cobham , inherited Stowe House . Wotton House was then operated jointly with Stowe House.
In 1820 a fire destroyed the interior of the house, but the coach house and the kitchen pavilion ("Clock Pavilion") survived the fire unscathed. Richard Grenville, the 2nd Marquess of Buckingham, commissioned John Soane to restore the main house before the embers had cooled down. Soane cut the house in height by removing the top floor and reducing the height of the windows on the first floor. This gave the house Georgian proportions. He used the existing floor plans in an intelligent way and created a three-story triforium with skylight and a new stone staircase in place of the old entrance hall.
A number of Grenville's Wotton Houses, with the interiors designed by Soane, lived in until 1889, when the family's last male heir died. The house was initially rented and then sold to the politician Michael Beaumont in 1929 . He later moved to County Kildare, Ireland, and the house was sold to a charitable institution. In the Second World War it was neglected because it was not requisitioned by the state, and was offered shortly after the war for sale. After the war, a large part of the property was sold in small plots and in the early 1950s, two boarding schools for boys, Wotton House Boy's School and Cokethorpe School , which then moved to Witney , resided in the main building .
Restoration of the main house
Elaine Brunner bought the main house and Clock Pavilion from Buckinghamshire County Council for £ 6,000 in 1957, two weeks before it was due to be demolished.
Brunner hired Donald Insall Associates to do extensive work on the house, removing the signs of decay, removing most of Butler's alterations, and restoring Soane's architectural details. But the central detail of Soane's new building, the triforium that had been destroyed by Butler, was still unrestored when Brunner died in 1998.
The house fell to April , Elaine Brunner's daughter, and her husband, David Gladstone . The property is open to the public on at least one day in the summer months, but viewing the house is only possible by appointment.
In 2007 David Gladstone held a conference at Wotton House to find out the name of the house's original architect. This conference produced at least two results: Howard Colvin said in 2010 that John Fitch was the original architect, and later that year John Millar said that he thought Elizabeth Wilbraham (1632-1705) was so.
Conversion of the Remise into the "South Pavilion"
The original coach house (later renamed "South Pavilion") and enclosed formal garden were bought by Tristram Gilbert and Andre DuGuay just before Elaine Brunner bought the main house. They had both restored and lived there until around 1965. The enclosed garden was opened to the public. The "South Pavilion" was sold to the historian Arthur Bryant , who in turn sold it to Sir John Gielgud. As photos show, he had it restored. Gielgud died there in 2000. In 2008 Tony and Cherie Blair bought the South Pavilion for £ 4 million.
History of the property
In 1726 Richard Grenville inherited the Wotton estate, which rents in excess of £ 3,000 a year, from his father. In 1735 he introduced an Enclosure Act in Parliament that freed the area from residential buildings so that the gardens of London and Wise could be transformed into a natural landscape of a new style in the 1750s.
In 1754 another Hester , sister of Richard and George, married William Pitt the Elder at Wotton House and soon took on the project Richard had envisioned. At that time Richard had taken over Stowe House and George was living in Wotton House. Capability Brown had left Stowe House, where he had worked as the chief gardener, in 1749 and was employed to help Pitt carry out his project, particularly the extensive hydraulic engineering. It is not known what the exact division of labor between Pitt and Brown was, but Pitt was a noted landscaper himself.
The pleasure ground covers 80 hectares and includes two lakes, one with 14 hectares and one with 4.8 hectares, connected by a canal. It is enclosed in a belt, as was the custom at the time, and the visitor will find a number of temples, bridges and statues along the circular route.
In April 1786, John Adams (the future second President of the United States of America, traveling with Thomas Jefferson - who became its Vice President and later became US President himself) spent a few days visiting country houses in northwest London; one of these country houses was Wotton House. When Adams returned to London he wrote: “ Stowe , Hagley and Blenheim are superb; Woburn , Caversham and The Leasowes are beautiful. Wotton is great and elegant, if neglected. "Jefferson wrote in his diary:" But two gardeners. Very neglected. "
Major Beaumont sold the entire property in 1947 to neighboring farmers in plots. Between 1957 and 1985, Elaine Brunner gradually bought back around 160 hectares of land. Since 1998, David Gladstone has had much of the original site restored by his property manager, Michael Harrison .
Individual references and comments
- ↑ Butler is better known as the author of publications on Sir Edwin Lutyens .
- ^ A b John Millar: The first woman architect in The Architects' Journal , November 11, 2010.
- ↑ John Fitch is not mentioned in Howard Colvin: A Biographical Dictionary of British architects , 3rd Edition (1995).
- ↑ Dorothy Stroud: Sir John Soane, Architect . 1984. Plates 180-182.
- ↑ a b Staff: Wotton House . Vip Internet Limited . 2011. Retrieved January 12, 2017.
- ^ A b c Dean Ptolemy: Obituary of Elaine Brunner . April 10, 1998. In the obituary, the restoration of the house is considered.
- ↑ David Gladstone is a retired British diplomat and descendant of Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone .
- ↑ Staff: Camilla's charmer weds his true love . May 5, 2008.
- ^ Colvin's paper was published in the Georgian Group Journal in 2010 .
- ↑ Sam Jones: Blair's pay £ 4m for Gielgud's former home . The Guardian. May 5, 2008. Retrieved January 12, 2017.
- ↑ LJ Bellot: wild hares and red herrings: a case study of estate management in the eighteenth-century English countryside in The Huntington Library Quarterly . 1993.
- ^ Edward Hyams: Humphry Repton and Capability Brown . 1971. p. 14.
- ^ John Adams, Charles Francis Adams: The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Autobiography, continued. Diary. Essays and controversial papers of the Revolution . Little, Brown ,. 1851. Retrieved January 12, 2017.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 50 ′ 24.4 " N , 1 ° 0 ′ 23.4" W.