An architectural accident

In the first of two articles, John Goodall tells the story of how a stable was replaced by a splendid Regency seat

- John Goodall

ON May 3, 1811-a little over two weeks before his 18th birthday and almost exactly 200 years to the day since the first family owner of the property died there-Robert Berkeley laid the foundation stone of his father's new seat at Spetchley Park. The completed building remains an exceptionally well-preserved Regency house on the grand scale. Designed in the Grecian style, it is entered up a spreading flight of steps through a monumental temple portico. The Bath-stone exterior is sparingly detailed and sits within rolling parkland in a quintessentially English grouping, with the medieval parish church beyond.

Spetchley Park remains in the ownership of the Berkeley family and is perhaps most familiar today for its outstanding gardens. Since 2019, however, the house itself has been the object of an ambitious revival at the hands of its present owners, Henry and Kate Berkeley. With the help of George Saumarez Smith of Adam Architecture and the interior designer Emma Deterding of Kelling Designs, we will discover next week how its Regency interiors have been sensitively, but stylishly adapted for modern family life.

The story of the present house properly begins with the successful career of one Rowland Berkeley (also variously Barkeley or Bartlett), a wealthy cloth merchant of nearby Worcester. The heraldry and inscriptions of the splendid sequence of family tombs in Spetchley parish church (now managed by the Churches Conservation Trust) assert that he was a member of a cadet branch of the Berkeley family of Berkeley Castle and lineally descended from Thomas Berkeley of Dursley, Gloucestershire', who died in 1482.