Secret Houses of The Cotswolds

20
Wormington Grange

Gloucestershire

WORMINGTON GRANGE was built in two phases and yet elegantly feels all of a piece, serenely framed in deep lawns, looking over a lake. It could easily be the setting of an Austen novel, or an Agatha Christie mystery. From its approach avenue, Wormington presents only a splendidly calm, 1820s Greek revival entrance front, with a pronounced Ionic portico modelled on a Greek temple front. But this was all added to an earlier south-facing 1770s house which has two semicircular bows that rise to the full height of the house. Wormington Grange is now the home of John Evetts, a furniture expert well known as the man who advises the Landmark Trust on furnishing their many historic houses and follies. His greatest challenge and pleasure has been to fill the home that, when he inherited it from his parents, had very little contents.

Mr Evetts has always tried to acquire furniture and paintings which are appropriate to the story and character of Wormington, and he takes the greatest interest in the architectural evolution of the house. The 1770s house was built by one Nathaniel Jeffreys, possibly to designs of Anthony Keck. In 1787, merchant and banker Samuel Gist (sometimes Guist) of Bristol – who had made his fortune in America – acquired the Wormington estate, and it was his heir who built the neo-Greek front in 1826–7. Samuel Gist’s story is a rather extraordinary one. Gist had first gone out to America as an indentured servant to one John Smith, a tobacco farmer, and later married Smith’s widow – thus becoming a man of large fortune. He is something of a legend in the United States, for in his will of 1815 he freed around 500 slaves on his Virginia estates.

Samuel’s heir was his nephew, Josiah Sellick, who took the name Gist, and in the 1820s he commissioned architect Henry Hakewill to add the new entrance front, possibly with the intention of pushing his own son up the social scale – for in 1824 his son Samuel married the Hon. Mary Anne Westenra, daughter of the 2nd Lord.

Neoclassical ambition

Hakewill was a skilful designer, and added three spacious, fashionable reception rooms – a long dining room with a buffet recess and a drawing room, either side of a large entrance hall with a screen of Ionic columns behind which the hall is top-lit in a Soanian spirit. It made a commodious country house and included a large classically detailed (also top-lit) staircase hall leading to the upper floor, and the rooms of the older house refitted as a comfortable library and parlour. Hakewill also designed the spare neoclassical stables.

The house at Wormington Grange seen from across the lake – an idyllic picture of England.

The 1820s Greek revival-style entrance front

The 1770s house with its full height semicircular bay windows

The Ionic loggia designed by arts and crafts architect, Guy Dawber.

Neoclassical richness: the entrance hall, with its screen of Ionic columns, the walls painted a porphyry pink, the perfect backdrop for portraits.

Hakewill’s principal assistant, John Goldicutt, who had studied in France and spent four years travelling in Italy, might have been responsible for the chimneypieces and plasterwork, which give the house its assured elegance.

The house has changed little in form since the early nineteenth century, and remained with the Gist family until 1905. The current Mr Evetts’s great-grandmother, Maud Clegg, acquired the Wormington Grange estate for her family in 1920. She had means, as a niece of Marshall Field, the wealthy Chicago department store owner. She and her husband had lived nearer Broadway, in a house designed by the Cotswolds-based architect Guy Dawber. In 1920 they saw that the attractive small estate of Wormington – with more land and privacy than their current home – was for sale, and snapped it up. Dawber naturally helped at Wormington too, and made some key alterations including the creation of a sculpture niche in the entrance hall and the removal of additional Greek key pattern decoration from the hall. Dawber also designed the garden terraces and the loggia, while the arts and crafts architect Norman Jewson also worked on the garden’s design in the early 1930s (the metalwork gates were made by another arts and crafts figure, Alfred Bucknell).

The principal dining room, painted a warm green, and part of the suite of rooms added to the house in the 1820s, with the alcove into which a buffet table could be inserted.

The Cleggs’ only daughter, Kathleen, inherited Wormington Grange in 1933. She was married to ‘Pug’ Ismay, a career army officer (who was appointed a general in 1944 and made 1st Baron Ismay in 1947). According to Mr Evetts, ‘they redecorated the house with a fashionable London decorator, but made no major alterations until after the war’, when they had to adapt the house for life with fewer servants. The architect A.S.G. Butler reduced the historic servants’ quarters, and divided the house into two, with a part made over to one of their daughters, Mr Evetts’s mother.

Furnishing with fun

The house was returned to a single dwelling by the current owner, John Evetts, grandson of Lord and Lady Ismay. He inherited only a few items of furniture: ‘it would have been delightful to have inherited a fully furnished house but in truth I have had a lot of fun buying things which I like over the past forty years.’ He moved into one half of the house in the 1970s, and then in the 1980s took over the half which his parents had occupied. He adds: ‘one of the principles I have always maintained for here, and for the Landmark Trust, is that everything must have a use and that you must live in all the principal rooms and use them: elegant but also comfortable.’

‘You must live in all the principal rooms and use them.’
JOHN EVETTS

As a result the house reflects a kind of unaffected, traditional English country house style, mixing family portraits with early 20th-century oil paintings and engravings and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English furniture often bought especially for the house. Colours have been chosen to suit the period character of the rooms: a green-gray wall colour and chintz curtains in the high-ceilinged drawing room, while the entrance hall is painted a porphyry pink. The scagliola columns, which had been painted white before 1940, have been stripped to reveal the original green-grey, while the dining room is a typical warm green and hung mostly with portraits. Furnishings in the Regency rooms have been chosen to complement the robust architectural character, while the smaller 1770s rooms are more intimately furnished, with smaller oil paintings.

John Evetts has remodelled one room to become a west-facing kitchen, looking out onto a garden court of yew and box hedges which works the adjoining small dining room and library which are part of the 1770s house. In the nineteenth-century architectural plans it is shown as the office with adjoining gun room. Mr Evetts says: ‘For myself, I have always bought things which might well have been in a house of this date, and I have always stuck to names of makers who I admired: Lamb, Holland, Gillow and Howard. People often say the house feels as if it has always been thus, but that is an effect of things being in the right relationship with each other and the architecture. I always ask myself: does it feel right?’ His partner Anne Dowty also observes, ‘it is thankfully a very light and warm house and easy to live in: I think its furnishings were probably always changing over the generations.’ It is the warmth and deep rural setting of so many of these houses which has given the region such enduring appeal in the twenty-first century, and made the Cotswolds into an enviable English idyll.