The English Country House: From the Archives of Country Life

by Mary Miers, Jeremy Musson (Contributor), Tim Richardson (Contributor)

The English Country House  takes a look at the architecture and interiors of sixty-two stunning houses in a range of architectural styles spanning seven centuries—from the medieval Stokesay Castle to the newly built, Lutyens-inspired Corfe Farm—brought to life through the world-renowned photography library of Country Life . More than four hundred color and black and white illustrations provide an insight into the architecture, decoration, gardens, and landscape settings of these houses, which are set into their architectural and historical context by the accompanying text and extended captions.
 
The book provides an entrée into the houses to which Country Life has had privileged access over the years, many of which are still private homes, often occupied by descendants of the families that built them. Punctuating the book at intervals in the form of booklets on rich, uncoated paper are six essays by leading British architectural historians that set the English country house into its social context and chart the changing tastes in decorating and collecting, the development of ancillary buildings, gardens and landscapes, and finally, its influence in the United States. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, History, Art, Design

484 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2009

Reviews

[Melisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, large coffee table book for those, like me, who are fascinated with English manor homes. I borrowed this one from the library, but I may be asking for it as a Christmas gift this year.

[Christine Jeffords · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous doorstop of a book overflowing with color photographs of "manor houses" from the Scottish Border to the Cornish peninsula. Interiors and exteriors are shown, and capsulated family histories explain how the houses got to be what they are. If you love old houses, especially those that aren't exactly "grand" but could certainly be called impressive, you should definitely read it--but give yourself time: breaking it into quarters, and even with about half the pages made up of illustrations, it still took me two hours for each!

[Harold Cutts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book and well worth a copy. The pictures are of excellent quality and quite clear in a straightforward description.

[Tommy Gittings · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nice coffee table book, but I don’t necessarily recommend it for cover-to-cover reading since there’s not much in the way of a narrative thread.

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Country Life magazine was founded in 1897 and in every issue since then it has featured, in glorious photographic detail, one or another of England’s rural homes. Moreover, the editors have concentrated not on “greatly stately piles and ducal palaces,” as Miers calls them, but on actual residences still inhabited by actual families -- often the descendants of the original folks who built them many centuries ago. This weighty and oversized volume includes more than sixty homes covered in the magazine over the years, arranged in roughly chronological order of foundation. Thus, the first is Stokesay Castle, in Shropshire, established in the late 13th century, though there have been at least four major additions and revisions since then. It’s now owned by English Heritage, actually, though it only left private hands for the first time in 1992. The last, and newest, home in the book is Corfe Farm, Dorset, an entirely 21st-century construction, though it was built on the foundations of an earlier house and its comfortable style recalls the late 19th-century English manor house revival of Sir Edwin Luytens. In between these two are an astonishing collection of intriguing buildings and estates, ranging geographically from Great Dixter, near Hastings, and Trerice, not that far from Land’s End, to Barsham Manor, on the northern coast of Norfolk, and Blackwell, outside of Carlisle. The illustrations, a large proportion of them full-page, are nearly all in color and include outside views of entrances and gatehouses, indoor studies of state rooms and family parlors, and details of hangings, wallpaper, and carved chimney-pieces. The author’s accompanying text points out where later restorations and replications have been inserted -- usually quite invisibly, to the credit of the owners -- and notes the sad losses due to demolition or merely thoughtless rebuilding. (She doesn’t have much good to say, for instance, about J. Paul Getty’s depredations at Sutton Place, in Surrey, the original design of which was modeled on Hampton Court.) The volume opens with an extended survey of the architectural fashions which were reflected in country houses from the medieval period on, and the designers and schools of thought responsible for them, and closes with a very useful (though much too short) glossary of technical terms. If your interest is in architecture or interior design, this is a volume you will want to return to repeatedly.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has beautiful photos of English Country Houses (more like English Country Estates) from the archives of Country Life Magazine. It also has really interesting essays about each of the estates and about English Country traditions. I could stay in the pages of this book forever!