A house of many inspirations

High Wardington House, Oxfordshire The home of Mr and Mrs Norman Hudson A pre-eminent country-house adviser has created a home from a 300-year-old farmhouse and farmyard

- Jeremy Musson

HIGH WARDINGTON HOUSE sits on a steep edge above a surprisingly intimate part of Wardington, known as Upper Wardington, with a handsome group of Hornton-stone houses clustered around a green, known locally as the Old Pool. These houses reflect both the vernacular building traditions of this area of Oxfordshire, close to Banbury, and the historic pattern of the prosperous farming villages of the region. This former farmhouse constituted one arm of a traditional four-sided courtyard grouping of barns and outbuildings. It has all the varied roof levels that were admired and imitated by Arts-and-Crafts architects in the early 1900s and, from the steep approach, its entrance is playfully marked through mature topiary, including figures of a peacock and a saluting soldier.

In architectural terms, the building (Fig 2) is a cumulative creation. At one end is a small house of 17th-century origins, which was added to in the 18th and 19th century to produce a more extensive farm dwelling.

Its current overall flavour today, however, belongs perhaps as much to works in the 1970s and 1980s, when it became a family home. In 1977, the farm was bought from the historic Edgecote estate—then owned by the Courage family—by Norman Hudson, the founder of Hudson's Historic Houses & Gardens Guide and a long-term adviser to the Historic Houses Association, and his wife, Jane, an entrepreneur who founded and ran Presents for Men. The land they acquired was mostly sold on to other farming enterprises.