Your Places or Mine

Send us Fan MailClive is writing a book for Yale University Press on the Story of the American Country House. John indulges him by discussing an introductory overview of the subject, with which Clive has been engaged since Yale published his The American Country House in 1990.  Here is a rich and colourful theme, celebrating a sometimes spectacular architectural tradition shaped by remarkable individuals.  There are numerous reasons people in Colonial American and the developing United States wanted houses outside the city.  Rural simplicity expressed a godlier life; country air was good for the health; the drama of the American landscape appealed to the Romantic imagination.  By 1900 there was a school of highly sophisticated architects who could serve any need.  While some American country houses bore a resemblance to their cousins across the Atlantic, they were, in the early 20th century, built for a different purpose, which was recreation and sport.  There was little sense that these were dynastic seats.  As soon as fashion changed or money ran out, owners moved on.  Hundreds of country houses on Long Island, for example, were demolished after the Great Crash in the 1920s.Clive and John consider these and other aspects of the subject, in the light of the renaissance of country house building that can be seen in many parts of the US today.

Send us Fan MailWhen the German Prince Puckler Muskau visited England in 1826, he told his divorced wife that it would take her ‘at least 420 years to see all the parks of England, of which there are undoubtedly at least 100,000, for they swarm in every direction.’  One of the most splendid was that at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The garden was accompanied by an equally important country house, if not palace. John has just been there and describes this extraordinary creation, the product of many generations.What we see today is largely a product of the 18th-century owner Lord Cobham and his descendants.  It was Cobham who employed ‘Capability’ Brown to turn Stowe into (to quote the poet Alexander Pope) ‘as near an approach to Elysium as English soil and climate will permit.’  Sir John Vanbrugh, William Kent and Robert Adam were among the many architects who worked on the house. Through marriage the family became Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos.  But their princely extravagance hit the buffers in 1848 when a Great Sale of the contents was held.  Not even this could not keep the debts at bay indefinitely and much of the rest of the property was sold after the First World War.  The park came into the ownership of the National Trust and the house became a school.  Since 1977, the Stowe House Preservation Trust has been restoring the State Dining Room ceiling and returning Classical sculptures to the North Hall, among other projects. John describes the progress made in this magnificent endeavour.