5
Chavenage

Gloucestershire

HIDDEN AWAY IN WOODLAND, the whole house at Chavenage feels like a watercolourist’s dream. When first glimpsed, it seems to speak directly to the era of the proud stone manor houses for which the Cotswolds are so well known – stone walls, stone-tiled roof – and is famous today as the fictional manor house Trenwith in the television series Poldark. The entrance front is balanced by wings of slightly different characters, the projecting central porch draws the eye and the tall windows to the left signify the presence of a great hall. The latter is the core of a manor house thought to date back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century (inside there is a stone newel staircase which is of a type normally found in fifteenth-century houses, leading to the former great chamber). The estate had originally belonged to the abbey of Horsley but was granted after the Dissolution to Thomas Seymour, and thus began the life of the Tudor manor house.

Chavenage has been owned by the Lowsley-Williams family since 1891, who initially had inherited another estate locally but, disliking the house there, set about looking for a more suitable place. Chavenage was chosen, and today three generations of the family live here happily, giving the house its special character – busy, well loved, and well lived-in. David and Rona Lowsley-Williams live in the main house, where they have been since they married and David inherited the estate in 1958: ‘I think Chavenage has a rare atmosphere, it is a family home on many levels and a survivor of another age,’ he says.

Daughter Caroline Lowsley-Williams runs tours and events in the house, her brother George and his son James run the estate, and sister Joanna and family live in a wing, from which she runs her own business. She observes: ‘we feel part of this house, and it is a place to which we all return. In fact we all live in what you might call a cricket ball’s throw of each other.’ Indeed, they all work hard to preserve the atmosphere of the house and the strong sense of history and family that it exemplifies.

The great hall at Chavenage, a welcoming room with the scent of open fires and cut flowers, looking towards the ‘screens passage’ and eighteenth century organ.

David and Rona Lowsley-Williams, who took over the estate in 1958 and now share Chavenage with their three children and grandchildren.

From the approach the house seems hardly changed since the sixteenth century, but as historian Avray Tipping, who visited in the early 1900s, observed, it exhibits ‘a variety of styles, the handiwork of succeeding generations of owners’.

The porch has the date 1576, most likely representing a significant sixteenth-century rebuilding of an earlier house by the Stephens family who, wealthy from wool, had acquired the house in the previous decade. They remained in possession for nine generations, until the mid-nineteenth century. From the porch you pass through into the ‘screens passage’ which traditionally separated the hall from the pantry, buttery and kitchens (the latter moved to a new wing in the early 1900s), and then into the huge great hall, lit by a large window, where there always seems to be a generous fire burning and that familiar smell of woodsmoke, cut flowers and polish.

A medieval house, mostly rebuilt in the sixteenth century: the mellow entrance front, with the wing to the left part of an early nineteenth-century updating.

The house seen from the south, the early nineteenth-century additions to the right, and Edwardian section and estate church to the left.

The atmospheric Oak Room, the family’s drawing room, panelled with sixteenth-century carved relief decoration picked out in gold, some of which might have come from the demolished Eastington Manor.

Fragments of antique stained glass in a window in the porch.

The eighteenth-century organ in the great hall.

The billiard room, with Jacobean-style chimneypiece in white and gold.

Detail of the carved panels in the Oak Room.

Romance of the past

Chavenage has that very strong, romantic atmosphere which links directly to a very English taste – of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – for the suggestive interiors of ‘mansions of Old England’. The last of the Stephens dynasty to live here was a clever clergyman, Henry Willis Stephens. He inherited in 1801, and made some additions to the house in neo-Jacobean style, including the high-ceilinged billiard room now hung with nineteenth-century paintings. In a surprising twist, Henry later renounced his inheritance as a landowner in favour of a nephew, moved to Tenerife and became a Dominican friar. But before his conversion to Catholicism, the artistic Henry seems to have carried out some of the antiquarian-inspired redecoration in the early 1800s, incorporating panelling and carvings that possibly originated from another family home, Eastington Manor (also in Gloucestershire), demolished at the end of the eighteenth century.

The tall windows of the hall are filled with handsome seventeenth-century stained glass, which again was probably part of Henry’s work. He may also have introduced the early seventeenth-century chimneypiece, probably from the other family estate – it carries the arms and initials of two of the Stephens family, for a long time owners of both Chavenage and Eastington. The diminutive estate church, which almost adjoins the house and is still in regular use was, remarkably, built first as a folly perhaps as early as 1700, and then adapted to serve as a consecrated Anglican place of worship in the nineteenth century.

‘We feel part of this house, and it is a place to which we all return.’
CAROLINE LOWSLEY-WILLIAMS

Tapestry and oak

Two of Chavenage’s bedrooms, named in honour of Ireton and Cromwell, are hung with Flemish tapestries which have been cut down to cover the walls, complementing the mellow, carved oak furniture. The beds are covered with patchwork quilts crafted by members of the family. These rooms are intended to be especially evocative of one mid-seventeenth century owner, Nathaniel Stephens, a Cromwellian colonel and MP who suffered a fatal illness ‘a few months after his acquiescence in the king’s death’. During the Civil War, Nathaniel Stephens fought on the side of Parliament against Charles I. General Henry Ireton (Cromwell’s son-in-law and kinsman of the Stephenses too) came to visit in 1648 to persuade Stephens to support the execution of the king, which he reluctantly did – family legend says he was cursed from that moment.

There are several relics from the Civil War period, including horse furniture, a leather hat cover and swords and pikes, in the Ireton Bedroom. The portrait of Cromwell in the Cromwell Room was a gift from novelist Barbara Cartland, sister-in-law of Mrs Lowsley-Williams’s father.

Caroline Lowsley-Williams observes that ‘most of the oak furniture is in the rooms where it was when my family bought the house in 1891.’ She adds: ‘they were Sheffield foundry owners, and some things came from their house in Yorkshire. The best portraits came from their smart Saville relations – cousins of the Earls of Mexborough.’ The Stephens family ‘rented Chavenage to my family first, not intending to sell, but then sold and remained at their Irish home, Castletownsend, where some of the furniture had already gone’. The billiard room is hung with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings; the anteroom has become a museum to family history.

The Lowsley-Williamses added a substantial east wing, with a fine oak-panelled ballroom, in 1904–5, designed by architect J.T. Micklethwaite, a former assistant of George Gilbert Scott and a partner of the architect Somers Clarke (best known for the hotel they designed together in Funchal, in Madeira). Caroline Lowsley-Williams observes that her great-grandmother ‘thought it would be social death not to have a ballroom’. David Lowsley-Williams says: ‘She was certainly a forceful lady and all her improvements obliged them to sell other inherited Gloucestershire estates.’ This handsome room, hung with family portraits, has come into its own for wedding parties in more recent times.

Rona Lowsley-Williams, Caroline’s mother, has lived in Beaufort country since she was a small child. When they opened the house to the public in the 1970s, they decided to make more use of the former servants’ domain. She recalls: ‘We moved our sitting room to the servants’ hall, which we found was the warmest room in the house.’ She also notes the importance of the past: ‘In my mind the furniture still belongs to the generations who went before, who surround us in paintings and photographs. Our job is to keep it all polished, and ready for future generations.’

Warm colours and old rooms: detail of oak chair dated 1629.

The Ireton Bedroom, with antique tapestry cut down to decorate the walls in the early nineteenth century.

Detail of the tapestry depicting a scene from the story of Scipio.

Patchwork quilts worked by members of the family in the Cromwell Room.

In the Cromwell Room, the portrait of Cromwell was a gift from a cousin, novelist Barbara Cartland.

A seventeenth-century helmet or ‘cabasset’.

Detail of the sixteenth-century verdure tapestry in the Cromwell Room.