Baroque delights

A major restoration project, winner of a Georgian Group award in 2019, has revived a magnificent house inspired by the architecture of Baroque Rome. John Martin Robinson reports

- John Martin Robinson

Chettle House, Dorset The home of Tom and Rosamond Sweet-Escott

CHETTLE is the finest surviving Baroque house in Dorset and has recently been carefully restored by Hugh Petter of Adam Architecture. The surrounding formal garden has also been reinstated to the original concept, with axial vistas, claire-voie, reflecting pool and symmetrical quincunxes, as an integral part of the architecture. Now, it can be fully appreciated once more as an 18th-century design and an accomplished work by Thomas Archer, to whom it was first attributed on stylistic grounds in a pioneering article by Geoffrey Webb in COUNTRY LIFE in 1928.

Webb (1898–1970) was one of the first modern British architectural historians, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, friend of Roger Fry, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge and head of the Monuments and Fine Arts section of the Allied Control Commission in Europe at the end of the Second World War. He wrote for COUNTRY LIFE and TheBurlington Magazine and is remembered as a medievalist, but he was one of the first historians to study the English Baroque as a stylistic entity when it was barely recognised, let alone understood. His writing on Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor in the 1920s preceded Kerry Downes’s studies by 40 years.