Lights, camera, action!

Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary

ONE day in January 1938, Christopher Hussey, then Editor of COUNTRY LIFE, went to visit Birchens Spring near Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, a newly built country house in the Chilterns designed for C. Rissik by John Campbell, a little-known English architect, and built by Messrs William Hartley of Slough. Writing in COUNTRY LIFE (January 29 and February 5, 1938), Hussey was greatly impressed by the originality and maturity of Birchens Spring’s design, which combines ‘something of the provincial Roman villa, something of the English manor house, and something, too, of “modern”’. Why, he wondered, had we never heard of Campbell before? The answer was simple—‘because he was not here’. At least, not that often, his life story reveals.

John Archibald Campbell (1878–1948) was born in Wolverhampton, where he studied and later taught at the School of Art. In 1902, he met Heinrich Pössenbacher, the son of a Munich interior decorator, who offered him a job as chief designer. In July 1914, Campbell was appointed regius professor of Architecture at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich, Germany.

However, the outbreak of war that year saw him interned for the duration before being repatriated to Britain in August 1918.

Between 1922 and 1928, Campbell was a partner in Falconer, Baker & Campbell, based at Amberley in the Cotswolds, where the practice designed several houses in the Arts-and-Crafts tradition. The partnership was dissolved in 1928, after which Campbell opened an office in Berlin.

However, the economic depression of 1931 forced his return to England where he settled in Cornwall. Here, between 1934 and 1939, he built three houses, similar in style to Birchens Spring, on the headland at Chapel Point, Mevagissey. It was typical of the ill luck that dogged his life that Campbell fell from the cliff and died in August 1948, when returning to Chapel Point after posting the papers for a planning appeal to continue the development.