Secret Houses of The Cotswolds

10
Frampton Court

Gloucestershire

MRS JANIE CLIFFORD observes of her home Frampton Court: ‘I was quite awestruck by the house when I first saw it, but my parents-in-law always gave me a warm welcome; so the house has always had that feeling of warmth for me. Rollo’s mother often used to say this was a good house for a party.’

Indeed the house, built for Rollo Clifford’s ancestors in 1731–3, was probably designed with parties and entertaining in mind. An attractively simple classical form, symmetrically arranged with lower wings either side, the central block is built in warm-coloured stone, with elegant details creating an air of unexpected grandeur for a house of this scale. The wings are simpler, and rendered, but crowned with eccentric chimneys.

James Norris Brewer’s Delineations of Gloucestershire (1827) described Frampton Court as ‘suited in every particular, to the residence of that most estimable character, the country gentleman of England’. The house was indeed the residence of a country gentleman, but one who had made his fortune from a career in Bristol.

The house was designed and built for one Richard Clutterbuck, a ‘searcher’ for the Bristol customs house, who succeeded his father in that post. In 1727 Clutterbuck also inherited the ancient Clifford family estates at Frampton. The Cliffords had been landowners at Frampton since the late eleventh century. The estate had passed from Captain John Clifford in 1684 to his Clutterbuck grandson William, Richard’s father. Richard’s development of a new house announced the status of the family, which had depended on a long attachment to the land rather than money.

A house of welcome

Rollo and Janie Clifford own and run the Frampton Court estate today, and life on the estate is the subject of a chapter in Adam Nicolson’s elegant book The Gentry: Stories of the English, published in 2011. Mrs Clifford says ‘we do regard this house as the jewel in the crown of the Frampton estate. The family has been here a long time and we treat the house with great affection and pride.’

The spirit of welcome: the stone-flagged entrance hall, with its original panelling, stripped and waxed, and the fine staircase visible through the broad arch.

An inviting spectacle: the spirited part-baroque and part-Palladian entrance front of the house.

The more austere Palladian garden front, with the contemporary side pavilions and their exaggerated chimneys

The elegant Gothic-style orangery attributed to William Halfpenny.

The drawing room with its 1730s panelling and framed chimneypiece.

The hearth of the entrance hall, with a painting installed in 1772.

The solid, rear staircase.

The stately panelled dining room.

A portrait of Rollo Clifford’s grandmother, Hilda, looks over the dining table.

A detail of a pedimented doorcase.

Rollo and Janie Clifford, with the Gothic orangery behind them.

The function and quality of the rooms had clearly been much pondered by their ancestor. A set of architectural plans by Thomas Fassett were supplied to Clutterbuck, including one which shows a plain Palladian box, with a piano nobile and a storey above three-bay pavilions on either side to be linked with curved arcades. Fassett’s design was probably modelled on plates from James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture (1728), which was so popular with amateur designers and working surveyors and builders. But Fassett’s austere proposal did not find favour, and Clutterbuck instead chose a different, more decorated design. The architect of this design is not known, but it has been attributed to John Strahan, who was the architect of Redland Court, outside Bristol. Another candidate for designer might be Nathaniel Ireson, who designed Berkley House in Somerset.

The raised ground floor (or piano nobile) of Frampton Court’s five-bay centre block, in Bath stone, is approached by a welcoming flight of steps. Although the overall feel is Palladian, the entrance elevation has a touch of the baroque too, in the elaboration of the Ionic pilasters, the surrounds of the windows and entrance door, and the carved armorial in the central pediment. The mid-eighteenth-century master craftsmen of Bristol were renowned for keeping their strong baroque traditions alive even as they passed out of fashion elsewhere.

The principal garden elevation is a little more conventionally Palladian, with a segmental pediment over the central door to the raised ground floor, and triangular pediments over the windows at each end of the elevation.

Stepping into the past

Frampton is especially exceptional for the survival of so much of the original fittings and furniture, which were supplied to the house in the 1730s and 40s. To step inside this house is to step into the well-loved past. The main hall has Doric pilasters and a bold cornice, carved in pine, which were probably therefore originally painted when the room was created in the 1730s, but stripped and waxed in the twentieth century. The painting fitted over the chimneypiece was acquired in 1772, and depicts a scene from The Maid of the Mill (1765), a popular comic opera by Isaac Bickerstaff. A broad arch frames the magnificent staircase, with dado panelling inlaid with holly. There are also finely carved putti hanging down from the tread-ends.

The drawing room is panelled in oak with an inset overmantel depicting ships at sea – the fireplace is also framed by English Delftware tiles. The dining room is panelled in oak, with a pedimented overmantel and pediments over doors. One door opens to reveal an alcove in which can be seen some of the Chinese armorial service supplied to Clutterbuck.

‘The family has been here a long time and we treat the house with great affection and pride.’
JANIE CLIFFORD

Mrs Clifford notes the importance of the quality of these historic materials and textures throughout the house: ‘There are so many different woods, original panelling, carving and inlaid work on the stairs – the pale inlay wood is holly and was intended to catch the candlelight as you climbed the stairs to bed. Visitors always remember the early eighteenth-century concertina dog-gate at the base of the stairs; it folds away so neatly and is suggestive of a much lived-in house.’

There are various textiles and bed hangings throughout the house. ‘We have a number of seventeenth-century worked hangings in the bedrooms and as far we know they have always been in the family, and are presumed to have been in the Jacobean house on the site which preceded Frampton Court, says Mrs Clifford. ‘The large piece of tapestry in one bedroom depicting a landscape with a house is thought to have been woven for the house by Huguenot weavers who settled nearby – the panelling seems to have been installed around the tapestry. We are having this tapestry cleaned in Belgium and conserved in Bristol. While it is away this gave us the opportunity to display a loan piece by Grayson Perry, The Upper Class at Bay, in which Frampton Court is depicted in the distance.’

Frampton is framed by trees, and Clutterbuck was also active in his garden. He commissioned a delightful mid-century garden building in the Gothic style, an orangery originally described as a ‘greenhouse’. Again, the authorship is uncertain; some details can be compared to Batty Langley’s Gothic Architecture, Improved (1747). It is usually attributed to William Halfpenny, a Bristol architect who designed the Gothic Stouts Hill in Gloucestershire and the classical Cooper’s Hall in Bristol. This splendid fantasy building is now converted to a holiday cottage and, seen across a long canal, it forms a happy and serene picture.