Secret Houses of The Cotswolds

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Asthall Manor

Oxfordshire

SOMETIMES IN THE COTSWOLDS you can take a turn off a busy road and find yourself heading into a valley of lush fields and woodlands. In these parts, the villages have a quiet and timeless feel, while the church and manor house provide the visual focus, as they have done for generations. There has been a manor house at Asthall, near Burford, for many centuries, and the house we see today, with a hall range at its core between two gabled cross wings, dates principally to the early and mid-seventeenth century. This was given a more regular frontage in the later nineteenth century, and extended by 2nd Baron Redesdale from 1919.

In 1997, the house was bought by Rosie Pearson, who has made abundant new gardens with designers Julian and Isabel Bannerman; adding yew tunnels, sloping parterres and wildflower meadows. This is all described by Victoria Summerley in her book, Secret Gardens of the Cotswolds, as ‘a living embodiment of the classic English garden’, a green and flower-filled frame for the long, low gabled house.

The Bateman family occupied the house for much of the nineteenth century, and from 1889–1899 one of the more socially ambitious Batemans made an effort to separate the house from the busy farmyard. In 1919, the house and most of the land were bought by Lord Redesdale, who thus reunited Asthall Manor with its historic estate – which he already owned, along with 14,569 hectares/36,000 acres and the family seat, Batsford Park in Gloucestershire.

Mitford memories

Redesdale is now better known as the father of the famous Mitford sisters, memorably fictionalised as ‘Farve’ – or Uncle Matthew – in the novels of Nancy Mitford, and the house is considered one of the models of the legendary Alconleigh from her novels, The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). Anxious about running costs and rising taxes, he decided to give up the family’s main house, Batsford Park, in favour of this much smaller manor house. Deborah Mitford, the late Duchess of Devonshire, recalled in Country Life magazine in 2009: ‘Asthall Manor was on the market and was the ideal solution. It is the archetypal ancient Cotswold manor house, hard by the church, the garden descending to the river Windrush with the prettiest village imaginable and farms to match.’

Rosie Pearson in front of Asthall Manor, which she bought in 1997 and restored as a family home.

The heart of a house: the comfortable long, oak-panelled ‘living hall’ serves as both sitting room and dining room.

With the Birmingham-based arts and crafts architect Charles Bateman, the Redesdales remodelled parts of the main house. They also converted a barn into a music room and library (later known as the ballroom). This had a vast mullioned bay window and barrel-vaulted ceiling with typical arts and crafts plasterwork. Diana Mitford recalled of it: ‘This large room, furnished with hundreds of old books, a grand piano and sofas, with high windows looking south and east, was all the world to my brother Tom and me at Asthall. He played all day, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, and I lay on a sofa, reading and listening.’

This wing, connected to the main house by a covered stone cloister, also had a series of bedrooms for the older children above it. Bateman was a pioneer arts and crafts architect of the 1890s, designer of a number of comfortable large houses in the suburbs of Birmingham. He was called in to conserve and remodel a number of key Costwold buildings, including the famous Lygon Arms in Broadway. The builders at Asthall Manor were the old Cotswolds family firm of Groves.

The Mitford children loved the house and were sad to leave it. The famous ‘Hons’ cupboard is still an attic-floor linen cupboard at Asthall Manor, where the sisters gathered to talk ‘for hours about life and death’ – Jessica Mitford in Hons and Rebels (1960), recalled the ‘enchanting promise of complete privacy from the Grown-ups’. Redesdale was a restless figure troubled by money worries, and commissioned a spacious new house in an earlier eighteenth-century classical spirit, called Swinbrook House, to which they all moved in 1926. Asthall Manor was bought by a Mr Thomas Hardcastle and was owned by his son, Anthony until he died in 1997.

A new chapter

In November 1997, Asthall Manor was acquired by former journalist Rosie Pearson: ‘I was driving along the A40, and looked down into this astonishing valley. I had seen the house advertised for sale, so having time to spare, I drove down to see it and was carried away: initially the landscape and village attracted me more than the house itself, which looked quite austere at the time’ – but there was clearly potential in the old stone house. ‘The agent said, “it’s outside your budget, too far from Oxford”, and also gently reminded me that I had said that I didn’t want a “project”. It was even sold to someone else, who really wanted the land and quickly put the house back on the market.’

‘It is the archetypal ancient Cotswold manor house, with the prettiest village imaginable and farms to match.’
DIANA MITFORD

A daughter of 3rd Viscount Cowdray, Ms Pearson grew up at Cowdray Park, a huge nineteenth-century house in Sussex, but had lived in Jamaica for a decade before returning to Britain, and wanted a house with enough room for family life, yet also with a certain intimacy. She worked on Asthall Manor from 1998–9 with architect Robert Franklin of Oxford. Their work included restoring the roof and recreating a former porch leading into the living hall. ‘The principal changes were to open up the kitchen into one big room – removing a partition – and to add the big, mullioned bay window in the same room that looks out into the garden on the west side of the house. I had built a new house in Jamaica from scratch, a wooden house on a hill, which was a very rewarding experience. After living in Jamaica with all that green and colour, everything seemed rather bland in England.’

The gables and chimneys of Asthall Manor create an attractive composition with the parish church of St Nicholas.

The house seems almost to sink into the lush green garden created by Ms Pearson over the past twenty years.

Ms Pearson has changed very little of the bones of the old house and preserved all the existing panelling and chimneypieces, and she has introduced some strong and bright colours. The long ‘living hall’ (part of the original great hall which was later subdivided into different rooms) is used as ‘both dining room and sitting room’, and is dotted with contemporary stone sculptures, by artists including her partner Anthony Turner, as well as William Peers, Luke Dickinson and Matthew Simmonds, and paintings, including works by Augustus John, William Nicholson and contemporary artists.

Ms Pearson recalls that it was a job finding furniture that suited these large, often quite low-ceilinged rooms, ‘but things arrived by a series of happy accidents and were tried out in different places in the rooms; the house has a good structure to hang things on.’ The ‘happy accidents’ include a hugely long kitchen table that had once been at Badminton, sourced by David Bridgwater.

Ms Pearson has kept alive that atmosphere of an old house connected with its landscape, and in the summer the abundance of the semi-wild planting seems to reach into the house – something that the young Mitfords would surely have relished. There are touches of the new, such as the gateposts, which are stone sculptures by Anthony Turner. It was this which inspired the biennial sculpture show in the gardens around the house, on form. The natural feel of the gardens has been of great importance to Ms Pearson as part of the Asthall project, and as well as on form, the former music room-library is used for events and exhibitions. Indeed, Asthall has become a rural satellite of stone sculptures, art, yoga, political, philosophical and literary events, showing how naturally the old Cotswolds house can adapt to every age.