Secret Houses of The Cotswolds

8
Duck End House

Oxfordshire

DUCK END HOUSE has the feel of a house from a dream – stone-built with a stone-tiled roof, it sits upright and assertive in the sloping landscape, and has a rugged isolation that hints at stories and characters yet to be revealed. It lies close to Chipping Norton, and has an almost sculptural presence in its terraced garden setting. To the entrance side, the house reads as a neat farmhouse of two storeys and an attic, with five symmetrically arranged windows framed with drip moulds around the centrally placed doorcase. Three neat, small dormers announce the attic, and add to the symmetry. From the garden side, however, you can see three storeys and an attic, with a central staircase tower. While small for a manor house, Duck End House nonetheless has an essential and unmistakable architectural dignity which speaks of some social confidence in its building.

Duck End House dates to the early seventeenth century. Some of the original barns stand just below the house, and just above it the simple, stout and unrestored, possibly sixteenth-century dovecote (and some later traditional stone barns). Such small manor houses with attendant buildings were a typical feature of the Cotswolds, but the vast majority have been much extended or replaced, and it is very rare to find one so fundamentally unchanged since the early 1600s.

Since 2002, Duck End House has been the country retreat of art expert Philip Mould and his wife Catherine, with whom he runs the Philip Mould Gallery. They have carefully repaired and restored the house. Such projects are often almost continuous – they have overseen the conversion of a 70s flat-pack bungalow into a two-storey stone cottage, more in keeping with the older group of stone buildings, and they are in the process of converting the smaller, L-shaped barn close to the house into a dining room, with service kitchen and a study-library (‘we need a little more space to hang pictures too,’ says Mr Mould).

The comforts of home: the main drawing room which fills one storey of the house, and is hung with a selection of seventeenth- and early twentieth-century paintings.

They have also extended the terraced garden around the house, recreated a small lake and put the surrounding fields to wildflower meadow. ‘The land,’ says Mr Mould, ‘is historically indivisible from the house.’ It was the landscape which attracted them as much as the simple beauty of the house: ‘I had known this part of the world well for a long time before we began to think of finding a house here. I come originally from Liverpool and Catherine from Wales, and we were susceptible to the distinctively ancient and poetic landscape of the Cotswolds.’

Catherine Mould had spotted a photograph of Duck End House in a magazine article which stated that it had changed hands a year or two before, and showed the cutting to house-searchers as an example of the kind of house they were attracted to. By chance those very house-searchers knew it was coming back on the market. Mr Mould says, ‘in some ways buying a house is analogous to buying a work of art: you want something original, beautiful and honest, and this house fulfilled all those requirements.’

Hardly altered since the seventeenth century, Duck End House, seen across the field. From the approach the house appears to have two main storeys with an attic, while from the side it can be seen how the builder of the house took advantage of the sloping ground to make it three storeys with attic.

Understanding the house

Mr Mould’s experience of restoring works of art influenced their approach to the restoration of the house: ‘Again, as with an old picture, before you do anything you need to try and establish the provenance. Wanting to find out more, we approached an Oxford-educated zoologist, Carol Dingle, who happened to live in the village, and who carefully researched the house for us, and every weekend when we came down would reveal some new morsel.’ She used a wide range of resources ‘from field names to the archives of Brasenose College, Oxford’, and established that this was one of three manors listed in the village at Domesday, at the start of the eleventh century.

No references could be found to the actual building until 1618, when it was owned by Alexander Wheeler, and a date stone of 1628 at the lower ground floor level seems likely to date the house as we see it now. The house was then owned by Ann Cope, the widow of a wealthy Puritan baronet, and was presumably designed and built as a secure but manageable dower house.

The house gradually ceased to be a gentry residence over the next two hundred years, and in the nineteenth century a new, bigger house was built on the small estate. So the old manor – as happened all over the county – became a place where farmworkers and their families lived. The last tenant was a carter called Reginald Tanner, who still used all the barns and stables fully, after which the house stood empty and was increasingly derelict until there were genuine fears of its demolition.

In the late 1940s, the house was acquired by the Landon family, who appear to have been sensitive and artistic characters, and carried out an exemplary repair of the house; preserving what they could, using local builders, and striving to maintain the character of the old house while introducing some careful adaptations to make it habitable, such as inserting a new door on the ground floor.

The house was later sold to the novelist Penelope Lively, whose husband Jack was an academic at the University of Warwick. Mrs Lively had a study on the ground floor (now part of the main kitchen). She wrote in 2000 of her memories of the view from the house and of writing Moon Tiger (which won the Booker Prize in 1987): ‘the ending was prompted by the view from my desk there, looking out onto the lawn.’

Heart of the house: the dining table in the ground-floor kitchen, looking towards to the seventeenth-century stone chimneypiece.

The three-light mullioned window in the kitchen, with Catherine Mould’s carefully chosen studio pottery and ceramics arranged on the sill.

The house seemed audibly to breathe, and the humanity of the place could be felt.
PHILIP MOULD

Understanding who had lived in the house before them, and how they had lived in it, was essential to the Moulds: ‘Once we had established the provenance – all the names of the owners going back to the seventeenth century – the house seemed audibly to breathe, and the humanity of the place could be felt.’ The Moulds had found an experienced Oxfordshire-based architect, Robert Franklin, and set him an interesting challenge. ‘As with restoring a Jacobean portrait, the first thing you have to do is remove modern accretions and get back to its historical integrity; even if you find damage,’ says Mr Mould.

Stone and other repair works were carried out by Symm & Co. of Oxford, who have a long history of work on many historic colleges there. A local antique dealer helped the Moulds find appropriate furniture. He also ingeniously turned some of the few remaining but much damaged original seventeenth-century oak floorboards into window seats for the house.

Charles and Jenny Sutton helped the Moulds to develop the garden, excavate the pond and carry out numerous other works. Catherine Mould notes, ‘The garden layout goes back to the 1940s and I’m always conscious about heavy-handed modern intervention.’ A deep shelf on the staircase displays china, shoes, horseshoes, tokens and buckles found during the works in both house and garden.

Tempered idealism

When they first began to furnish the house, the Moulds started buying principally seventeenth-century oak pieces, but they began to feel that trying to be too pure could be a problem. They first acquired French leather furniture and then upholstered sofas ‘just to make life comfortable’. Philip Mould refers to the need for ‘tempered idealism’. There are a number of carefully chosen portraits including one of the Royalist Colonel Cope, found unexpectedly at auction. The rest creates an eclectic but complementary mix: a small portrait attributed to Cornelius Johnson, a studio of Lely picture, and twentieth-century British paintings by artists such as Cedric Morris and Gilbert Spencer. Catherine Mould has added studio pottery and ceramics from local shops and markets. Duck End House feels like it has always been thus, but the seemingly effortless elegance has been carefully thought through between Philip and Catherine, and every choice is the result of care and judgement.