This impression is confirmed as one approaches the main south front of the house, an imposing white ashlar limestone building in the Italianate style of the mid-1860s. House and grounds are a perfect complement of Italianate green architecture and are linked by formal terraces with three staircases decorated by marble urns and recumbent—probably Italian—greyhounds acquired by the Italian sculptor Chevalier G. M. Casentini.
If this all feels rather unlikely in Yorkshire, that is because it reflects the taste of one man, Charles Sabine Augustus Thellusson, who came into an extraordinary inheritance in 1858 and devoted much of it to creating the hall and its gardens in his own personal style.
‘Today, he would be an oligarch,’ says Michael Klemperer, senior gardens advisor for the North and Midlands regions at English Heritage (EH), which now looks after house and gardens. ‘The money he received from the will was £700,000, which, with interest, equates to £140 million today.’ With the cash came the estate that had belonged to his great-grandfather Peter Thellusson, a Swiss financier, who had moved to London in 1760 and built up a fortune as a merchant and banker.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 21, 2021-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 21, 2021-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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