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.
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin September 13, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin September 13, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
A tapestry of pinks
THE garden is now entering its season of vigour and exuberance.
Bringing the past to life
An event hosted by COUNTRY LIFE at WOW!house is one of the highlights of a programme that features some of the biggest names in interior design
This isle is full of wonder
GEOLOGY? A bit like economics, the famously boring science? I confess I suffered the prejudice—agriculture and history being my thing, both of them vital in every sense— but Robert Muir-Wood’s voyage through the past 66 million years of the making of the British landscape has biblical-level drama on almost every other page. Flood, fire, ice… or, perhaps, the formation in rock, sand, mud and lava of these isles is best conceived of as fierce poetry.
Empire protest
Without meaning to issue a clarion call for independence, E. M. Forster perfectly captured the rising tensions of the British Raj. One hundred years later, Matthew Dennison revisits the masterpiece A Passage to India
Hops and dreams
A relative of marijuana, hops were a Teutonic introduction to British brewing culture and gave rise to the original working holiday
Life and sol
The sanctuary of the Balearic Islands has enchanted a multitude of creative minds, from Robert Graves to David Bowie
'Nature is nowhere as great as in its smallest creatures'
Giving himself neck ache from constantly looking upwards, John Lewis-Stempel makes the most of a sunny May day harvesting ‘tree hay’ and marvelling at the myriad wildlife including flies and earwigs–that reside on bark
'Plans are worthless, but planning is everything'
Country houses great and small were indispensable to D-Day preparations, with electricity and sanitation, well-stocked wine cellars, countesses to run the canteens and antique furniture to feed the stoves
The darling buds of May
May Morris shared her father’s passion for flowers, embroidery and Iceland, but was much more than William’s daughter. Influential both as a designer and as a teacher, she championed the rights of workers, particularly women, as Huon Mallalieu reveals
Achilles healed
Once used to comfort the lovelorn or soothe the wounds of Greek heroes, yarrow may now have a new starring role in sustainable agriculture