Best Contemporary Country Houses

Country homes are becoming closer to our hearts and can offer the perfect sanctuary from our busy lives. This gorgeous book is a showcase of the very best contemporary country houses the world has to offer.

Nowadays, we build not so much country houses as houses in the country. The homes in this book offer a panorama of the Western world - from Europe and North America to far off Australia. They were designed by some of the best contemporary architects and illustrate by their diversity their common attachment to the particular character of a place and to the need to reconcile human habitat with natural space.

The cream of contemporary rural residential architecture.

The ‘country house poem’ was born in the seventeenth century as a fruitful way of flattering potential patrons. But the genre’s popularity faded – ironically, just as ‘country house society’ was emerging. It was only when the power and influence of the landed classes had all but ebbed away that poets returned to the theme, attracted perhaps by the buildings’ irresistible dereliction, but equally by their often very personal histories. This is the first complete anthology of modern country house poems, and it shows just how far (as Simon Jenkins points out in his Foreword) poems can ‘penetrate the souls of buildings’. Over 160 distinguished poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer fascinating perspectives on stately exteriors and interiors, gardens both wild and cultivated, crumbling ruins and the extraordinary secrets they hide. There are voices of all kinds, whether it’s Edith Sitwell recreating her childhood, W. B. Yeats and Wendy Cope pondering Lissadell, or Simon Armitage’s labourer confronting the Lady who’s ‘got the lot’. We hear from noble landowners and loyal (or rebellious) servants, and from many an inquisitive day-tripper. The book’s dominant note is elegiac, yet comedy, satire, even strains of Gothic can be heard among these potent reflections. Hollow Palaces reminds us how poets can often be the most perceptive of guides to radical changes in society. The book is illustrated by Rosie Greening.

Investigating various ways in which the cultures of the town and the countryside interact in architecture, original essays in this book written by an international range of recognized theorists will help all students of architecture and urban design understand how the urban and rural relate. Taking a broad historical sweep, this collection draws on a symposium of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

Over the course of the long 18th century, many of England's grandest country houses became known for displaying noteworthy architecture and design, large collections of sculptures and paintings, and expansive landscape gardens and parks. Although these houses continued to function as residences and spaces of elite retreat, they had powerful public identities: increasingly accessible to tourists and extensively described by travel writers, they began to be celebrated as sites of great importance to national culture. This book examines how these identities emerged, repositioning the importance of country houses in 18th-century Britain and exploring what it took to turn them into tourist attractions. Drawing on travel books, guidebooks, and dozens of tourists' diaries and letters, it explores what it meant to tour country houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Wilton, Kedleston and Burghley in the tumultuous 1700s. It also questions the legacies of these early tourists: both as a critical cultural practice in the 18th century and an extraordinary and controversial influence in British culture today, country-house tourism is a phenomenon that demands investigation.

This volume of primary sources examine British architectural history from 1830-1914. The collection contains a mixture of architectural treatises, biographical material on architects, works on different types of building, and contemporary descriptions of individual buildings. This title will be of great interest to students of Art History and Architecture.