TOP: The rear wing of the house, designed by Anthony Keck and added in the
1790s, has commanding views of one of the lawns and pond
RIGHT: A Regency mirror hangs above the fireplace in the drawing room which is
filled with artwork
original Tudor mullioned versions, has changed since a detailed bird’seye view of the estate by the meticulous topographical artist and engraver
Johannes Kip was published in a book of 1712.
This rare engraving, a framed copy of which Thomas has hung in
the entrance porch, is particularly valuable because it shows not only the
house but also the precise arrangement of the garden walls, the gazebo
(‘modernised’ in about 1700), the old stable block and the planting of
the more distant parts of the estate. The current appearance of the
surroundings of the house owes much to Pepe Messel’s inspired replanning and careful tending. Having trained originally at Camberwell
College of Art and the Royal Academy, she has more recently turned her
painter’s eye to landscape gardening. Taking her inspiration from Kip’s
print, she swept away an ugly parking space at the front of the house to
create a perfectly contrived box parterre, while at the back of the house,
she bulldozed a run-down tennis court and replaced it with a sunken lawn
that opened up vistas to a replanted orchard and the view beyond.
Inside the house, the same mix of quiet continuity and inspired
reinvention has resulted in a sequence of rooms full of delights. Much
of the internal appearance of the house came into the possession
of Thomas Dawes, a rich local cloth merchant who ‘gained his great
estate by his own industry’. Delightfully, it is recorded in the 1727 The
Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire by Sir Robert Atkyns that,
the better to enjoy life in his pretty manor house, Dawes then ‘left off
his employment because he knew he had enough.’ It was most probably
he who transformed the old Tudor hall, eliminating the, by then,
outdated enclosed screens passage and big, draughty chimneypiece, and
introducing cosy, modish fielded panelling both here and elsewhere in the
house. Following Thomas Dawes’s death, the house passed several times
from one branch of the family to another, and gradually it ceased to be
a principal residence, instead being let out to tenants. This gentle neglect
had the happy consequence of preserving much of the interior largely
untouched for almost a century.
Only at the very end of the eighteenth century were major changes
undertaken when a new addition was built at the rear. This 1790s wing,
designed by West-Country architect Anthony Keck, added a high110 Bridge for Design December 2015