Secret Houses of The Cotswolds

18
Upton House

Gloucestershire

IF THE COTSWOLDS is usually thought of as the land of older, gabled manor houses, its middle-sized classical houses are often a source of surprise and delight. Upton House, near Tetbury, is one of the most satisfying of these. It is a handsome Georgian ‘box’ built around 1752, and represents a civilised English ideal. The house has an unexpected place in twentieth-century art history too, as Kenneth (later Lord) Clark leased the house in 1939 and installed his family there during the early part of the second world war, while moving pictures from London to the safety of the West Country. Many of the artists he admired most, including Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and John Piper, stayed as guests, along with musicians William Walton and Eddy Sackville-West.

The current owner, Roger Seelig, acquired the house in 1983 from the St Clairs, whose family had owned it since the 1860s. Roger Seelig and Claire Ward Thomas have made it a comfortable and welcoming house in a traditional way. The interiors reflect a very English look, with comfortable sofas, piles of books, well-chosen English pictures and Grand Tour paintings, which transport the eye to Italy.

Inspired to improve the family accommodation on the north side of the house, a double-height, modern classical hall has been added. This was designed jointly by Roger Seelig and the architect Craig Hamilton. Completed in 2005, the light-filled room transforms the rear facade of the building and brilliantly complements the elegant rooms of the original house.

Classical Cotswolds

The original Upton House was built for the Cripps family in the early 1750s, and incorporated some parts of an older house, which the Cripps family had owned from the sixteenth century. They owned Upton House until 1818. The main elevation suggests that the patron, Nathaniel Cripps, wanted a building of some elegance – although the side elevations are surprisingly plain.

His architect, currently thought to be William Halfpenny of Bristol, did not disappoint and created a seven-bay elevation of unmistakable magnificence; a central pediment with a carved armorial crowns the central three bays, supported by four Ionic engaged columns. The house has an essentially Palladian character with a rusticated ground floor, enlivened with baroque details. The entrance is a semicircular headed door with its own pediment supported on brackets. The tall first-floor sash windows, crowned with pediments, have little inset balustrades, while the second floor has shallow windows, the central three oeils-de-boeuf.

These details make a beguiling play across the warm Cotswolds stone, especially in changing light when the shadows come and go. The windows of the rusticated ground storey have large central keystones which have an echo of the work of John Vanbrugh, while the attic storey has low, small windows. The first-floor windows are crowned with pediments, all triangular except the central one, which is segmental.

Mid-Georgian grandeur: the double-height drawing room, the original entrance hall, with its ornate plasterwork decoration and pedimented doorcases.

Cotswold classical elegance: Upton House was built in the 1750s, influenced by both baroque tradition and the Palladian fashion of the day.

A new wing was added to the left, and a matching Venetian window added to the late nineteenth-century wing to the right, while between are the windows which light the new vaulted double-height room completed in 2005.

The architect William Halfpenny is a curious and mercurial figure, best known today for the many pattern books he published. Such books were especially important in spreading the message of Palladian architecture in the eighteenth century, and provided provincial architects and builders with essential reference material.

Halfpenny is described as ‘architect and carpenter’ in the title pages of his books. There is no documentary evidence of his involvement at Upton yet discovered, but historians Marcus Binney and Nicholas Kingsley have given the attribution their support.

The south-facing double height hall within is a real tour de force, a piece of mid-Georgian architectural and decorative theatre rising through two storeys with rich detail, including giant fluted Corinthian pilasters. Exuberant stuccoed swags of fruit and flowers meet over circular niches containing busts. Behind the hall is an equally splendid oak staircase rising the full three storeys.

This main entrance hall (presumably always used for reception and entertaining) became the principal drawing room, probably in 1892, when the architects Waller & Son added an oddly placed classical porch to the south-west (they had added a wing to the north-west in the 1870s). On the garden front, there is a small sitting room and a library either side of the hall, both handsomely detailed. There is a large principal dining room in the wing to the north-west, and part of the recent remodelling of the house provides a family breakfast room and kitchen in the new wing on the north-east corner.

The new classical hall, designed by architect Craig Hamilton, which provides another principal room of reception and improves the circulation of the house.

The circular roundels displaying classical busts echo those of the original entrance hall.

The oak staircase from below. A round-headed window looks down into the vaulted room.

A bust in an unadorned circular niche in the new hall.

Upton House was acquired in 1866 by Major General Sir Archibald Little, who was known as a ‘hero of the Indian Mutiny’, and it passed to his son Major Cosmo Little in 1890. The house passed by marriage to another military family, the St Clairs, of whom Mrs St Clair was the last resident. She was the granddaughter of Alice Liddell of Alice in Wonderland fame. The nursery at Upton was once filled with the original Alice’s things.

‘I sometimes quietly rejoice in the thought that I will leave my corner of England a little better than when I first found it.’
ROGER SEELIG

Restoration and renewal

Roger Seelig says: ‘My parents’ country house burnt to the ground when I was a small child just after the war, and I think I must have always harboured a latent desire to replace it with one of my own. In 1981 the opportunity arose when as an avid weekly reader of Country Life I saw that Upton House was advertised for sale. To me it represented the quintessential English country house from the age of the Enlightenment.’

Upton House is, he feels, grand yet small enough to be manageable, and he recalls; ‘My wild enthusiasm blinded me to its physical state – the roof lead had been stripped and replaced with a layer of green felt, with plumbing and wiring to match’. Moreover, he wanted to improve the house he had bought: ‘This perfect gem of a house had some ugly twentieth-century carbuncles on the north side, and I longed to resolve that facade with an empathetic addition grounded, to quote Robert Adam, “in a design determined but not confined by antiquity”; not pastiche, something which honoured the quality of the original’.

Roger Seelig had seen Craig Hamilton’s work in an exhibition for a design competition for a new country house, which he had won, and asked him to help with his project for Upton. It took a ‘determined’ twenty years to achieve this addition, and the result won a Georgian Group commendation. Roger Seelig says: ‘I believe it illustrates the possibilities of the continuing classical tradition appropriately.’ He has also delighted in filling the house with contemporaneous George II furniture and silver, and English portraits and Grand Tour paintings. He says: ‘This house has been a challenge, but also a central delight and a rock in my adult life, and I sometimes quietly rejoice in the thought that I will leave my corner of England a little better than when I first found it.’