Ernest Barnsley, winter garden and troughery at Rodmarton Manor, Rodmarton, Gloucestershire
THE COTSWOLDS, A REGION IN THE WEST COUNTRY noted for its hidden valleys and the distinctive soft, gray limestone used in its buildings, is still a mecca for the Arts and Crafts Movement. Because the Cotswolds were both remote and economically depressed after the removal of its once-flourishing wool industry to the north, its sleepy villages and trove of medieval and Tudor stone buildings remained undisturbed, only to be rediscovered in the nineteenth century. William Morris, whose Kelmscott Manor was situated just on the edge of the Cotswolds, reveled in the region’s old buildings, traditional crafts, and natural beauty. He, in turn, inspired several architects and designers to move to the Cotswolds to set up workshops practicing some of the local crafts.
In 1884, Morris encouraged Ernest Gimson (1864–1919), a young man from Leicester who had attended one of his lectures, to become an architect. Armed with a letter of introduction from Morris, Gimson went to work in John Sedding’s London office, and while there he met fellow architect Ernest Barnsley (1863–1926), from Birmingham, as well as his younger brother, Sidney Barnsley (1865–1926), who was in Shaw’s office. They became fast friends, sharing living quarters in London and imbuing themselves in the world of Arts and Crafts, with Morris and Company’s showrooms next door to Sedding’s office.
According to Gimson’s biographer, Norman Jewson, his gospel was that of Morris, “of healthy employment for all in making useful and beautiful things or productive agriculture, giving everyone an intelligent interest in their work, time to do it as well as might be, with reasonable leisure time for other interests.”1 Following Morris’s recommendation to learn manual skills, Gimson began making rush-seated ladderback chairs, which became a staple of his later workshops. Gimson also became interested in reviving the long-lost art of plasterwork, studying examples in old manor houses. True to Gimson’s style, he adapted, rather than copied, antique examples, using floral elements, such as roses, honeysuckle, dianthus, lilies, strawberry plants, and, in later years, his signature squirrels and oak leaves.2 The Barnsley brothers took up cabinetmaking and woodworking, and all three routinely exhibited their work at the annual venues of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London.
After several years devoted to travel (Sidney Barnsley toured Greece in 1888 with Robert Weir Schultz, another important Arts and Crafts architect) or building houses in the Midlands, they became gripped by the romantic notion of living and working in the country.3 With their families in tow, they removed to the Cotswolds in 1893 to begin earning their livings along the lines dictated by Morris. They were among the first of Morris’s disciples to set up workshops in the country. In 1902, Charles R. Ashbee’s (1863–1942) Guild of Handicraft, founded in London in the 1880s as a result of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, moved to Chipping Campden, where it continued to produce its distinctive metalwork and furniture until 1907, when it foundered due to competition from companies such as Liberty’s.4
Gimson and the Barnsleys specialized in a new type of furniture and decorative arts that drew heavily on traditional country models without replicating them. They were renowned for their high level of craftsmanship and their exclusive use of native woods. In workshops first at Pinbury Park and later at Daneway House in Sapperton, most of the wares were executed by local cabinetmakers. In addition to their furnishings, which were much in demand, Gimson and the Barnsleys also undertook select architectural commissions ranging from repairing old buildings to designing new cottages.5 Their architectural work, which was characterized by a respect for vernacular traditions, use of local building materials, and an affinity for the surrounding landscape, elicited much praise. As one critic wrote in 1909, they “are among the leaders of the school that is seeking to create an original and living style in architecture.”6
Their fledgling efforts caught the eye of Lord Bathurst, who leased them his summer home at Pinbury Park, with magnificent views over the Sapperton Vale, provided they would repair the old Jacobean house. From 1894 until 1901, the families lived together at Pinbury, where they established the first of their furniture-making workshops. Under Ernest Barnsley’s direction, they added a wing to the house, Gimson plastered the ceiling, and they made other improvements to the property. At the same time, they refurbished two terraced gardens, one near the house and enclosed by a low dry-stone wall, and the other on a lower level, adjacent to an ancient yew allée. They added a simple, yet elegant, stone summerhouse in one corner of the enclosure and lined the garden with clipped topiaries.7 They would adapt all these elements in their later, more renowned, work. When Lord Bathurst returned to take up residence in the newly improved Pinbury Park, he generously gave each of the families land in Sapperton on which to build their own houses. Each house was a highly individualistic expression of its designer.
Ernest Barnsley, who was the most outgoing of the three personalities, selected an old cottage dating from approximately 1800, up a steep lane from the village church and commanding a breathtaking view over the vale. Naming it Upper Dorvel House, he added two wings to the cottage, carefully marrying the new with the old by adhering to local Cotswold building traditions. Furnished throughout with products of their workshop, the house has a main hall embellished with Gimson’s plasterwork ceiling and decorative friezes in floral motifs. Meandering, low stone enclosure walls define the confines of the property, and nestled between the entry drive and the house is a small formal garden terrace. Laid out as a rectangular room, an extension of the house, the terrace features neatly clipped boxwood shrubs and simple flower beds. As H. Avray Tipping, Country Life’s architecture critic, wrote, “the charm of the little garden makes us pause without. It at once gives the impression that it is right; that it fulfils the particular requirement; that it is of the shape, size, material and construction needed at this special spot. . . . This enclosure . . . is the requisite semi-formal link between the straight lines of the building and the tumbled Cotswold landscape.”8 What Barnsley achieved at Upper Dorvel House—the simple configuration, use of local materials, and intimate relationship with the house—was the essence of an Arts and Crafts garden that would be emulated by many other designers.
Gimson built himself a new L-shaped cottage, named Leasowes, with rough stone walls and a thatched roof. His house, which reflects his exacting requirements and the effects he wanted to produce, is conspicuous for its absence of ornamentation, an austerity that marks his furniture designs. Described as “a thinker, an explorer, a teacher,” Gimson was the more reflective of the three and passionately committed to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement, embracing simplicity, utility, and respect for materials in all of his work.9 In the living room, a plain whitewashed ceiling with oak beams, thick stone walls, and a large open hearth provide an atmosphere that one critic called “a temple of elegance and refinement.”10 Like Upper Dorvel House, the grounds are enclosed by low dry-stone walls, with an extraordinary stone dovecote at the entry gate. The finely crafted rubblestone wall and towering dovecote caught the eye of Country Life, and a photograph of it is included in Lawrence Weaver’s Small Country Houses of To-Day in 1912. The dovecote’s rustic charm symbolizes the creativity of architectural detailing during the Arts and Crafts era. Jekyll and Weaver praised Gimson’s naturalistic pool at Stoneywell Cottage, near Leicester, where the margin carefully followed the natural contours of the ground. “Mr. Gimson,” they wrote, “has shown an appreciation of the character of the site by making the pool accord in its rough simplicity with the attractive, roughly-built cottage.”11
Sidney Barnsley, who was more apt to work on his own rather than provide designs for furniture to be made by craftsmen, built himself a small, rustic stone cottage with thick stone slabs on the roof. Like Gimson’s cottage, Barnsley’s Beechanger has an extraordinary dovecote rising from the stone wall like a lighthouse looming up at sea. Barnsley was involved in architectural work on two old Cotswold manor houses, both with noteworthy gardens. In the 1920s, he remodeled Combend Manor, a seventeenth-century house in Elkstone, and laid out a garden, loosely configured in a series of terraces near the house, and a naturalistic pond garden farther away near the orchard. Characteristically, the terrace gardens were enclosed by low dry-stone walls, with a stone summerhouse in one corner and several archways, one with a dovecote at the top.
In July 1925, Jekyll prepared planting plans for the pond garden and the herbaceous borders at Combend Manor. Her introduction to Sidney Barnsley may have come from their mutual friend, the architect Robert Weir Schultz.12 Jekyll, who was then eighty-one years old, sent detailed planting plans for the garden, based primarily on the survey plan provided by Barnsley. The pond garden, with drifts of ferns, shrub roses, and naturalized groupings of bulbs in the grass, did not go forward, although there is a similar water garden there today. Her recommendations for the herbaceous borders leading to the summerhouse are thought to have been implemented. At this time in her life, Jekyll worked almost entirely from her exhaustive memory of plants, providing her signature, but predictable, groupings of favorite perennials. Her mind was still exceptionally acute in sounding out overall design improvements, but a number of her recommendations for architectural embellishments for Barnsley’s plan, including a pergola to frame the view across the valley, were nixed by the architect.13
At Cotswold Farm, a seventeenth-century house in Duntisbourne Abbots, not far from Cirencester, Sidney Barnsley added two wings in 1926 for Sir John and Lady Birchall. After Barnsley’s death later that year, Norman Jewson (1884–1975), who originally came to Gimson’s office in 1907, made further improvements to Cotswold Farm. He laid out extensive terraced gardens on the hillside in 1938, replete with a characteristic stone summerhouse in the lower garden. His stone terraces, connected by a series of steep staircases, gave architectural bones to the garden. In later years, the Birchalls’ daughter-in-law transformed Jewson’s garden into a horticultural paradise, with the introduction of rare trees, shrubs, and herbaceous perennials in the best tradition of English garden making. On the upper terrace, overlooking the unspoiled valley, a group of columnar box topiaries lend the house and garden its unmistakable Cotswold character.14
Jewson, who chronicled the work of Gimson and the Barnsleys in his autobiographical memoir, By Chance I Did Rove, worked in the traditional Cotswold manner, refurbishing a number of manor houses. Jewson set up his own practice in 1919 after working briefly for Gimson; he was known for his exceptional craftsmanship, respect for traditional building techniques, and conservation efforts. As he modestly observed, “I hoped that my buildings would at least have good manners and be able to take their natural place in their surroundings without offence.”15 In 1925, he purchased Owlpen Manor, a Tudor manor house near Uley, of medieval origin, with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century additions. Jewson spent the next several years carefully repairing it. The interiors are embellished with modeled plasterwork by Jewson and Gimson, as well as furnishings designed by all and made by teams of local craftsmen.16 Three asymmetrical bays, each dating from a different era, overlook a rare intact old garden in the foreground and a beautiful valley in the distance. Owlpen folds so naturally into the hill that it gives new meaning to the symbiotic relationship between house and surrounding landscape. The name Owlpen (which apparently has nothing to do with owls) implies enclosure.17
The old garden had been admired by many travelers, among them Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, and Geoffrey Jellicoe. As Jekyll and Weaver wrote in Gardens for Small Country Houses, plans and photographs can never convey “the wealth of incident crowded into an area of little more than half an acre” or “with what modesty the house nestles against the hillside and seeks to hide itself amidst regiments of yews.”18 The yews, in fact, are one of the distinguishing features of the garden. The square Yew Parlour, in Jekyll’s day nearly twenty-five feet (about seven meters) high and varying from six to ten feet (two to three meters) wide, was probably planted in the early eighteenth century when the medieval garden was refurbished. The site, which slopes dramatically to the south, is edged with rows of massive yews on the upper slope and along the main garden path to the south. This dramatic view has been memorialized in a Gothic-inspired etching by Frederick L. Griggs, an important artist and sometime architectural associate of Jewson’s. In 1927, an American architect commented that the garden “is one of the finest and most satisfying things of its kind anywhere [with] whimsical conceits, such as peacocks and dragons in yew.”19 Although the garden is not large in size, its form and planting is straightforward, yet dramatic.
In 1908, Gimson began work at the Drakestone estate near Stinchcombe, with its incomparable views over the Vale of Berkeley and the Welsh marshes. He got no further than constructing two stone cottages before his clients, Walter and Mabel St. John-Mildmay, replaced him with Oswald P. Milne (1881–1967), a young architect who had been a pupil in Lutyens’s office.20 Drakestone, which nestles into the hill, is the quintessence of an Arts and Crafts family house. It is built of local golden stone, with a stone roof that was a traditional feature of the region. Milne also designed a stone terrace, with walls and stairways leading to the garden, where a double-stairway, built over an arch with a Lutyens-inspired pool underneath, offers an enchanting view to the house. Weaver praised Drakestone as a “good example of the success which comes from the right handling, in the simplest way, of materials beautiful in themselves.”21
In the mid-1920s, Milne designed a charming holiday house and garden at Coleton Fishacre for the Rupert D’Oyly Carte family. The house, which lies deep in a Devonshire combe, was built entirely of local materials, including blue-gray shale. At the edge of the quarry, Milne built a stone belvedere, and closer to the house, stone terraces and water features, including a rill garden. Lady Dorothy D’Oyly Carte, however, was responsible for the marvelous shrub gardens and glades that drift casually down to the sea. As Christopher Hussey wrote in Country Life in 1930, “If houses may be endowed with personalities, Coleton Fishacre is a gentleman. It is completely at ease here, and it puts the landscape at ease no less than the visitor.”22 The house and garden are now one of the treasures of the National Trust.
Around 1909, Ernest Barnsley received a commission that would bring a new dimension to the Art and Crafts philosophy of planning a house and garden. After visiting Rodmarton Manor in 1914, Ashbee exclaimed, “The English Arts and Crafts movement at its best is here—so are the vanishing traditions of the Cotswolds.”23 Claud Biddulph, who had probably spotted the Country Life article on Barnsley’s own house in April 1909, asked Barnsley to design a “cottage in the country” that would be at once substantial in size and offer employment to the many local people. His plan was to spend no more than £5,000 per year, but his undertaking took until 1929 to complete.24 During these years, the project grew from a small country house to a large manor house. It has been owned by three generations of the same family and, unusually, is in unaltered condition today.
No doubt Biddulph was drawn to Barnsley because of Barnsley’s own house (just four miles, or six-and-a-half kilometers, from Rodmarton), but also for the furnishings produced in the Sapperton workshops. Rodmarton was pain-stakingly built by hand from local materials—stone from a local quarry and timber felled on the estate—by local laborers and furnished throughout with decorative furnishings designed by the Barnsleys that were made in their workshops or on-site. Jewson designed most of the decorative leadwork, featuring flora and fauna motifs. Conceived to look like a series of cottages on a village street, with five gables on the front and five on the garden side of the main house, Rodmarton gives a nod to the old, but avoids line-by-line imitation.
Barnsley provided the overall garden plan, laid out as a series of outdoor rooms, each enclosed by low stone walls or clipped hedges, leaving most of the details to the head gardener, William Scrubey. The ingenious series of interconnecting gardens, ranging from formal near to the house to informal farther afield, is based on the theories set forth in Sedding’s Garden-Craft Old and New. This is not surprising, as Ernest Barnsley initially trained with Sedding in London. The gardens encompass most of the dominant theories of garden design at the time, from Robinson in the wilder parts to Jekyll in the more formal areas.
The gardens to the west of the house have been designed to maximize the view across the Marlborough Downs from the south façade. The terrace on the south face is treated as the most formal garden room, with clipped yew hedges and Portuguese laurels.25 Adjacent rooms include a troughery and topiary garden, lined with stone feeding troughs collected from the farm and planted with alpines, and a winter garden, now planted with a pleached lime allée. Below the terrace and abutting the meadow is a rustic stone pergola covered in flame-red Vitis cognettiae (crimson glory vine) in the autumn. On axis with the terrace gardens is one of the most dramatic sequences of the garden, a double-bordered walk enclosed by high hedges, with a stone summerhouse to denote the end of the vista. From the summerhouse, visitors can gaze across the borders to the house.
The thirteen-foot-wide (four meters) borders are planted in large drifts reminiscent of Jekyll’s style. A large kitchen garden lies behind one side of the borders, while on the other are a series of enclosed areas, including a tennis court and a swimming pool, each suitably enclosed with high hedges. Even the wilder components of the garden—a rockery, croquet lawn, and orchard—are carefully delineated within geometric confines. The hornbeam allée, underplanted with wild cow parsley and combining formality and informality, is just one of the many incidents in the garden. The gardens at Rodmarton have only increased in their beauty as they have matured. At once there is a sense of privacy, enclosure, subtlety, and an inordinate attention to detail, just as in the house. In many ways Rodmarton stands as the supreme example of the vision of Ernest Gimson, the Barnsleys, and their associates in the Cotswolds.
By contrast, the gardens at Hidcote Manor, arguably the most famous in the Cotswolds (if not Britain), are the work of a rarefied connoisseur, rather than an architect. In 1907, American-born Lawrence Johnston began creating a complex garden from bare ground that eventually enveloped the modest manor house. Guided by books and his far-flung travels (he was an expert horticulturist and a dedicated plant collector), he created a masterpiece that draws millions of visitors today. Tipping credited Johnston with “cultural knowledge and faultless taste. . . . We get the botanical range of a John Tradescant or a William Robinson combined with the grasp of design of an André Le Nôtre or a Harold Peto.”26 Over the decades, Johnston, who had the benefit of a generous budget (albeit managed by his mother), expanded and fine-tuned his grounds with both formal and naturalistic features, drawing inspiration from gardens around the world. The inner core of garden rooms—the Stilt Garden, Pillar Garden, Circle, and White Garden—skillfully offset the naturalistic areas, such as the Stream Garden and the Wilderness. The Long Walk slices through the composition in one direction and the Theatre Lawn in the other. Although Hidcote is a grand creation that takes its inspiration in part from the Arts and Crafts philosophy, it goes well beyond its tenets of intimacy and simplicity.
