The Country House Ideal

ADAM Architecture has a worldwide reputation for traditional Western design. Although the practice is based in the UK, it has built award-winning projects of all types around the world, and is known for combining modern interpretations of the Classical tradition with the latest technology. Among its most admired work are its country houses, and 19 of these houses are the focus of this new book, written by architectural historian Jeremy Musson. Robert Adam co-founded the practice (as Winchester Design) in 1986, and has worked with technical director Paul Hanvey for more than 30 years (including at a previous incarnation of the practice). Adam now works with three other architect-directors - Nigel Anderson, Hugh Petter and George Saumarez Smith - to build country houses that are not period reproductions but creative interpretations of past traditions. Each director has his own architectural personality, together producing a body of work that uses historical precedents, including construction techniques, materials, layout and details, to give expression to thoroughly modern works. Their schemes address the modern-day realities of energy conservation, climate control, internet access, computer-managed systems and security - all prerequisites in contemporary house design. Unlike country houses of the past, today's houses must be functional without live-in staff. Kitchens are now the focus of much family life and entertaining, rather than spaces to be kept from sight. These and numerous other practical considerations receive meticulous attention in an ADAM Architecture country house. The book begins with two forewords, with Clive Aslet and Calder Loth offering their interpretations of the ideal country house from a British and an American perspective respectively. The introduction provides an overview of the rich and varied tradition of the English country house, from the medieval manor house to houses of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and the Classically inspired designs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through to the architecture of the Gothic Revival and then the Arts and Crafts Movement. Architects associated with the country house throughout the ages include, among others, John Vanburgh, William Chambers, Robert Adam, John Nash and Sir Edwin Lutyens. And now, today, ADAM Architecture is one of the leading practices designing and building new country houses.

The fascinating story of the evolution of the country house in Britain, from its Roman precursors to the present The Story of the Country House is an authoritative and vivid account of the British country house, exploring how they have evolved with the changing political and economic landscape. Clive Aslet reveals the captivating stories behind individual houses, their architects, and occupants, and paints a vivid picture of the wider context in which the country house in Britain flourished and subsequently fell into decline before enjoying a renaissance in the twenty-first century. The genesis, style, and purpose of architectural masterpieces such as Hardwick Hall, Hatfield House, and Chatsworth are explored, alongside the numerous country houses lost to war and economic decline. We also meet a cavalcade of characters, owners with all their dynastic obsessions and diverse sources of wealth, and architects such as Inigo Jones, Sir John Vanbrugh, Robert Adam, Sir John Soane and A.W.N. Pugin, who dazzled or in some cases outraged their contemporaries. The Story of the Country House takes a fresh look at this enduringly popular building type, exploring why it continues to hold such fascination for us today.

Cedar Grove, The Cliffs, Grumblethorpe, Mount Airy, Bartram's House and Garden: Accommodation of the Vernacular

This innovative new study examines the significance given to the country house in Ireland under the Union and how this is represented in the works of Edgeworth, Lever, Trollope, Martin and Somerville, Bowen and Lady Gregory. The Irish country house is set in a classical and European context as the centre for 'the good life' and the pinnacle of 'civilisation'. In Ireland, that inherited tradition was challenged by an alternative culture nominated as 'savage'. This book explores how the Irish country house was the focus of conflict between and symbiosis of 'civilisation' and 'savagery'.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

In this study, Kari Boyd McBride defines 'country house discourse' as a network of fictions that articulated and mediated early modern concerns about the right use of land and the social relationships that land engendered. McBride provides new perspectives on the roles of the discourse she identifies, linking it with a number of larger historical shifts during the time period. Her interdisciplinary focus allows her to bring together a wide range of material-including architecture, poetry, oil painting, economic and social history, and proscriptive literature-in order to examine their complex interrelationship, revealing connections unexplored in more narrowly focused studies. McBride delineates the ways in which the country house (on the landscape and in literature) provided a locus for the construction of gender, race, class, and nation. Of particular interest is her focus on women's relationships to the country house: their writing of country house poetry and their representation in that literature; their designing of country houses and their lives within those architectural spaces (whether as lady of the house or domestic servant). One of the most important and promising insights in this study is that country house discourse was not simply static and nostalgic, but actually worked to mediate change. All in all, she presents a fresh and detailed study of the great disparities between country house reality and the ideals that informed country house discourse.

Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History addresses the phenomenon of historic houses as a distinct species of museum. Everyone understands the special nature of an art museum, a national museum, or a science museum, but “house museum” nearly always requires clarification. In the United States the term is almost synonymous with historic preservation; in the United Kingdom, it is simply unfamiliar, the very idea being conflated with stately homes and the National Trust. By analyzing the motivation of the founders, and subsequent keepers, of house museums, Linda Young identifies a typology that casts light on what house museums were intended to represent and their significance (or lack thereof) today. This book examines: • heroes’ houses: once inhabited by great persons (e.g., Shakespeare’s birthplace, Washington’s Mount Vernon); • artwork houses: national identity as specially visible in house design, style, and technique (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Modernist houses); • collectors’ houses: a microcosm of collecting in situ domesticu, subsequently presented to the nation as the exemplars of taste (e.g., Sir John Soane’s Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); • English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained thanks to primogeniture but threatened with redundancy and rescued as museums to be touted as the peak of English national culture; English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained for centuries thanks to primogeniture but threatened by redundancy and strangely rescued as museums, now touted as the peak of English national culture; • Everyman/woman’s social history houses: the modern, demotic response to elite houses, presented as social history but tinged with generic ancestor veneration (e.g., tenement house museums in Glasgow and New York).

This monograph provides an insight into English country house fiction by twentieth and twenty-first century authors, with a focus on the works of E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. The country house is explored within the wider social and cultural contexts of the period, including contemporary architectural development. The variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of buildings which can be classified as such, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture and poetics of space, the country house, given its uniquely integrating and exceptionally evocative qualities, accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, literary portrayals of the country house can be seen as both prefiguring and reflecting the contemporary practice of living.