Comfort and convenience

Modernist country houses of the 1930s and post-Second World War period could be stylish buildings that made use of new technology. They deserve to be better known, as Adrian Tinniswood explains

- Adrian Tinniswood

WHEN John Dennys’s designs for the 5th Duke of Westminster’s new Eaton Hall were published in 1970, the Duke of Bedford wrote to the editor of the Architectural Association’s AA Notes to say that ‘one of the virtues of the Grosvenor family is that they frequently demolish their stately home. I trust future generations will continue this tradition’.

Dennys’s startling Modernist creation sent shockwaves through the conservative world of country-house connoisseurship.

The previous Eaton Hall, a magnificent Gothic monster designed for the 1st Duke by Alfred Waterhouse in the 1870s, was described by an awestruck Nikolaus Pevsner as a ‘Wagnerian palace [and] the most ambitious instance of Gothic Revival domestic architecture anywhere in the country’. But it had been demolished in 1961. Now, a new Eaton Hall rose like an angular white phoenix in rural Cheshire, gleaming white and flat-roofed.

The Duke of Bedford’s wish soon came true. Only 15 years after it was completed, the 6th Duke of Westminster announced that he had decided to take ‘a long hard look at the design of the house in order to achieve greater harmony with its surroundings’. With rather more directness, an estate spokesman said simply: ‘The building is an eyesore.’ The Cardiff-based Percy Thomas Partnership was brought in to add a new gabled roof, to replace the white marble cladding with local red sandstone, and to redesign the interiors with advice from Hugh Casson ‘in a manner more in keeping with the lifestyle of the landed gentry’.