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Campden House

Gloucestershire

SOME COTSWOLDS COUNTRY HOUSES can lie just within sight of a small town or village and yet at the same time seem completely remote, almost hidden in ribbons of dense trees. One such is Campden House, close to the picturesque market town of Chipping Campden. Originally called Old Comb (‘combe’ meaning valley), the long, stone house is on an elevated site, clinging to the side of a narrow, tapering valley, set against a backdrop of thick woodland. Surrounded by its own terraces and lawns, Campden House has a chaste yet dignified manorial character.

But the house is a more complex jigsaw than it first seems – a story of changing tastes and fashions. A mostly mid-nineteenth-century building, it was built in traditional Cotswolds style, extending a smaller house of 1628, which remains visible from behind. This rambling 1840s mansion was then reduced in size and tempered in a more deliberately Jacobean character in the 1930s.

Since 1975 it has been the home of the Hon. Philip and Mary Smith, who renovated the house and continued to extend and develop the planting of the terraced gardens around the house, most recently with advice from Rupert Golby and Hal Moggridge. The latter designed the lakes and enriched the parkland with new copses and sensitively sited trees.

What we can see of the original ‘Old Comb’ is compact and plain in ornamentation, and shows that it was tall and well sited for views. There is also a dramatically buttressed stone barn, which dates to 1628, designed in an unusually neo-medieval character. This hints that the early house may well have served as a grange on the estate of Sir Baptist Hicks (1st Viscount Campden). Lord Campden was a wealthy Royalist silk merchant who built the original early seventeenth-century ‘Campden House’ on a site just by the church. It did not last long, and was dramatically burnt down in 1645 during the Civil War by his fellow Royalists, to prevent it falling into the hands of Parliamentary forces. Today, remnants of the famous garden terraces survive, as do the gatehouses. The east and west banqueting houses escaped the flames, and are now holiday cottages in the care of the Landmark Trust. That gracious original house was never rebuilt, despite the land remaining with the family until the mid-twentieth century.

The very picture of a manor: Campden House, a 1620s house much extended in the nineteenth century, and again remodelled in the 1930s by arts and crafts architect Norman Jewson. The 1930s south front looks over the walled garden.

The house from the south-west.

The handsome 1620s barn with its dramatic buttresses.

The original 1628 house at the north-east end overlooks a garden of trim yew hedges and pyramids.

Victorian pile to arts and crafts home

Hicks’s daughter Juliana had married rather well – to Edward, Lord Noel, whose descendants became the Earls of Gainsborough in the 1680s. In 1841 a politician called Lord Barham – a Noel descendant – was made the 1st Earl of Gainsborough (‘of the second creation’). In deference to family history, he decided to rename and upgrade the modest ‘Old Comb’ into something altogether grander, as a residence for his son, now Viscount Campden.

Lord Gainsborough’s architect was R.C. Carpenter, a rising champion of the Gothic revival, better known for churches and schools, while the terraced garden around the house was laid out by Sir Thomas Naismith. A wholly new approach was also created via a drive that progresses sinuously from the town through both ancient woodland and newly established parkland.

In 1934, Campden House was sold by a younger son of the 4th Earl to a Mr John Crabtree, a successful electrical switchgear manufacturer, who wanted to rationalise and update the house. He promptly engaged Norman Jewson, one of the best-known architects associated with the Cotswolds arts and crafts, to do this work. He clearly craved something more recognisably of the Cotswold manor house style, which was then all the rage, as exemplified by the many new country houses being built in the district.

Jewson is an important figure in the Cotswolds story in the early twentieth century: son-in-law of Sidney Barnsley, and a follower of the principles of Philip Webb. He had worked on the completion of Rodmarton Manor and himself restored Owlpen Manor, near Stroud. He founded his own practice in 1919 and, until the second world war, was constantly in demand for country house extensions, cottages and church repair.

At Campden House, he tamed some of the Victorian Gothic exuberance, demolishing the two-storey porch and chapel and the former drawing room, and reducing the tower so it was absorbed into the roofline. He retained but re-ordered the main staircase. Jewson’s intention seems to have been to provide spacious, comfortable rooms with excellent views, and his new rooms have a pleasant, well-proportioned feel not easily mistaken for seventeenth-century interiors.

Jewson also brought all the rooms of the ground floor to the same level, and added a long new drawing room to the north, facing west over the valley, with a new dining room between that and the original staircase hall. He also replaced a cluster of domestic offices with a new south wing, which included a series of comfortable reception rooms, looking out onto a new terrace. Jewson’s friend, the artist Frederick Griggs, who lived in Chipping Campden, admired his work at Campden House and referred to it as the creation of: ‘a smaller and far more beautiful house, with all that is of historical interest or architectural worth retained’.

Jewson’s new terraced garden was framed within a buttressed wall, and finished with a plainly detailed, gabled corner banqueting house in the early seventeenth-century spirit. This buttressed wall also enhances the approach to the house, and this was the view he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1937. Jewson’s simple arts-and-crafts-inspired plasterwork is also found in several rooms, and his fine ornate lead rainwater goods, similar to those that were designed for Rodmarton, are a memorable contribution to the exterior. Jewson also added a staff cottage and remodelled the stable block alongside the handsome 1620s barn, which he carefully repaired.

Sadly, Mr Crabtree did not enjoy his much remodelled house for long. It was sold in 1936 to Major C.C. Naumann, who added a room to the south-east, but he too sold it on in 1942 to Captain George Coles, who lived here for the next thirty years. Coles was a collector of furniture and installed some antique carved chimneypieces and panelling which remain in the house.

The comfortable drawing room, looking towards a full bookcase.

The oak-panelled hall with 1930s plasterwork ceiling, glimpsed through the stone doorway from the staircase hall.

Campden house is a more complex jigsaw than it first seems – a story of changing tastes and fashions.

A beloved home

In 1972, the house was bought by Philip Smith, younger son of the 3rd Viscount Hambleden and descendant of the Victorian politician and businessman W.H. Smith. Mr Smith recalls: ‘I had just left the army, and I think we were very lucky to find this house. Although not much had changed really from the 1940s, it was in generally good condition.’ They did some minor alterations especially to the kitchen, with the architect Toby Falconer (now of Falconer & Gilbert Scott of Cheltenham) and made the house light and comfortable for their large family.

Mr Smith is an avid collector of watercolours, which hang throughout the house. The Smiths have made the panelled hall into a comfortable smaller sitting room – hung, as is the staircase hall, with family portraits, including a notable picture of his father by the painter Harold Speed. They also moved the main drawing room of the house to the south wing looking over Jewson’s enclosed garden. The mellow, colour-filled 3.2 hectare/8-acre gardens immediately surrounding the house have been a long-term project for the Smiths and their gardener Michael Lane, with fine borders, topiary and woodland walks – a delightful surprise in this very hidden little valley.

Keen gardeners, Philip and Mary Smith at Campden House.

The drawing room, added in the 1930s by Jewson.

Two details of the simplified arts and crafts ceiling plasterwork decoration in the house.

The principal staircase, with two details of the 1930s carving.

The oak-panelled dining room.

Looking into the dining room.

Stamped and coloured glass.