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Hillside Farm

Gloucestershire

THE NAME OF THE Gloucestershire village of Adlestrop alone was made famous by the poet Edward Thomas with his 1917 poem of the same name, which describes a train stopping in a remote station with no one about on a hot summer’s day, the poem capturing that very English quietude which he admired so much. The station is long gone, but the village remains small and picturesque. Humphry Repton, the famous landscape designer, worked at the manor house of the village, for cousins of the novelist Jane Austen. One of the few contemporary houses to be added to the wider group is Hillside Farm, built on an enviable elevated site looking towards Stow on the Wold, and the Evenlode Valley.

The new house – two storeys with attic – is an interesting hybrid, both classical and modern in feel, and handsomely proportioned and faced in warm Bath stone. It was completed in 2016 for Adam and Tierney Horne, who are Canadian and American respectively but had been based in London for a number of years. They knew the area well through hunting, and spent some time looking for a base in the Cotswolds big enough for their large family, and to entertain.

After a while, not finding what they needed, they began to think of building a new house. To that end they bought a modest farmhouse dating to the early 1900s, which had been much altered, and designed a new, essentially classical house for the site. Mrs Horne says: ‘we bought a view and designed the house around the view.’

Essential classics

The new house has a fundamentally neoclassical character, with tall tripartite windows on the ground floor echoing the work of the Wyatt dynasty, and giving a grid-like pattern across the southern elevation.

The main entrance is to the west, which leads into a black and white stone-flagged entrance and top-lit staircase hall, and gives an axial view through the hall and dining room out to the garden on the west side of the house.

The south front is divided into a large drawing room and a more compact sitting room, which can combine into one for entertaining. The tall windows to the south fill these rooms with light, and give an effective panoramic view across the Evenlode Valley, while there are also windows to the east and west of these rooms.

Built around a view, Hillside Farm’s garden terrace is an important part of the life of the house.

Hillside Farm has been designed in the classical idiom, and is set against mature woodland.

The house has a Regency flavour with its tripartite windows.

The entrance front.

‘We bought a view and designed the house around the view.’
TIERNEY HORNE

Mrs Horne says: ‘these are rooms where we can entertain, or I can just sit and contemplate the view in equal comfort. The views are like huge landscape paintings in themselves; I deliberately don’t have curtains in the drawing room, as we are not overlooked at night.’ The family kitchen and eating room is a very generous space facing east, while the entrance hall can also double as a room for larger dinner parties (almost in the early Georgian manner). Mrs Horne adds: ‘We had originally considered having a south-facing family kitchen and living room, but in the end changed the plans and put the kitchen to the east. It just feels better having this room to sit in.’

The approach to the design of the house was to have a new building which respected the traditional character of the area, famous for its stone-built houses, and also added to the long continuity of the smaller classical country house for which the Cotswolds has a certain reputation. Nonetheless, although they eventually did receive planning permission, it took some six years from the purchase of the site to the completion of their new home, with Robert Hardwick as executant architect.

Orderly interiors

It was worth the wait. The interiors are ordered in character and classical in proportion, and in some degree of detail, but have a consistently light, elegant and modern feel. The care taken in the fittings and fixtures, such as the wide oak floorboards and new stone chimneypieces, is particularly memorable. Especially handsome is the limed oak panelling in the east-facing dining room, which has strong echoes of the Cotswolds arts and crafts focus on materials and finishes in architecture. It is probably this emphasis on ‘finish’ that in essence unites the character of this house, and makes a stylish setting for Mr Horne’s collection of large-scale modern paintings, acquired over many years.

Mrs Horne observes: ‘for the architecture, we naturally spent a lot of time looking at books for things we thought worked well, and we were both very inspired by American and English Georgian architecture. I grew up in an 1860s town house in New York, which had been redone in the 1920s in a neo-Georgian style. It made a very comfortable home.’ Mrs Horne is a fashion editor and director by profession, and has worked for Elle, Vogue and Harpers & Queen, and is a partner in a jewellery company.

This long background in the visual impact of space, colour, material and light has been a key ingredient in the project at Hillside Farm, where Mrs Horne has chosen all the furniture and wall colours herself: ‘I aimed at simplicity overall; to create a home that felt calm, very connected to the landscape and which also had space for all our children to relax and bring friends.’ With the latter in mind she has herself designed a pool house by the outdoor swimming pool, which has the feel of a comfortable arts and crafts summer house with open timbers, a large open hearth and a stone floor of flags re-used from the old farmhouse on the site.

Tierney Horne and her daughter Ali in the drawing room.

Looking through the light-filled drawing room with long sofas and simple oak floors.

The family sitting room with its stone chimneypiece.

The limed oak-panelled dining room, looking through to the main hall.

Classic detail in a modern context: the chimneypiece in the hall.

The top-lit staircase.

The stone chimneypiece in the dining room.

Rosettes in the utility room.

A memorable view from the window-side bath.

The staircase rising from the main hall.

The first-floor office.

Open fires give Hillside Farm a warm, welcoming character.

In many of the bedrooms you find window seats, which underline the importance of the views to the design and execution of this building. This is a house designed around both the landscape setting and the views – Hillside Farm is a ‘house in the country’ in all senses of the phrase. There are more plans in hand for the garden setting of the house, but already Mrs Horne says: ‘I get the greatest satisfaction from having flowers to cut in the garden and bring directly into the house.’

There has been a strong emphasis on the uncluttered space and convenience which one would expect of a modern house, and yet with its fine materials and strong axial views linking the house to the garden and landscape beyond, Hillside Farm manages to have a very timeless feel.