HOLLIDAY HALL, as it was rather oddly named a few years ago, is an enchanting example of England’s most delightful home-grown style — country Baroque. A signature of these charmingly eccentric houses is a swept-up cornice or boldly shaped gable, here with distinct alternating curves.

The keystone over the front door proclaims that the house, near Sittingbourne, Kent, was completed in 1719 for Edward Holliday, or Hola-day, a noted London goldsmith who in London lived near Handel in Brook Street, Mayfair. He bought the property, then 300 acres, in 1715 but lived no more than a few months there. Soon after, it became a tenanted farmhouse, and this explains its remarkable state of preservation, complete with chunky early Georgian glazing bars.

Swanton Farmhouse, as it used to be called, was distinct enough to earn an illustration in Kerry Downes’s pioneering English Baroque Architecture, but in the 1960s it had to be rescued from demolition. Since then it has benefited from a series of owners who loved the place and carefully nursed it back to life.

When I visited the house last month it had been brought to a pitch of perfection by Paul and Katerina Harlow, veteran house restorers. They began in Bermuda with a 1704 house in St George’s and moved on through Park House at Hampton Court, Bushey Park Cottage and Mrs Gaskell’s house in Cheyne Walk. Appropriately Mr Harlow was a jeweller and furnituremaker and a highlight of the tour was an astonishing trio of cabinets, called the Alchemist’s Study, which deserve to go to the V&A as an example of modern craftsmanship.

One of the glories of English Baroque is the brickwork. Here the plum or pomegranate-coloured brick of the walls is offset by red brick dressings to the windows and extra fine “rubbed” brick window heads with putty joints. The keystones are capped by little ledges, like the brackets on contemporary fireplaces and cabinets for displaying blue and white Delft. If he had stayed, Mr Harlow says he would have added statues of the Four Seasons along the parapet, celebrating Holliday’s friendship with Handel.

An inviting photograph could be taken looking through the front door case into the miniature Baroque stair hall with the kitchen glimpsed beyond. The whole building has the sense of a very artful doll’s house and if the façade folded back you would find a series of pretty panelled rooms, each with a few choice pieces of furniture. The hall has the flourish of a key-pattern frieze. To the left is a 24ft-long (7m) drawing room running from front to back with characteristic window seats. Mr Harlow found the early 18th-century panelling beneath dry walling. Behind the flush Baroque fireplace is a much larger hearth, suggesting that Holliday may have incorporated parts of an earlier house. The dining room on the far side of the hall has a typical corner fireplace. The kitchen at the back was ingeniously extended when a recent owner incorporated a farm lean-to. The first-floor bedrooms are panelled, with more pretty fireplaces. The panelling has recently been Farrow and Ball’d in pretty pastels, and great fun has been had with the radiator covers, which alternate between Chinese Chippendale and Strawberry Hill Gothic.

Every landing, half landing or alcove is a set-piece with built-in bookshelves and a desk in front of the window, while a windowless attic is transformed by a boat bed framed by striped curtains. The house has a good dry cellar with distinctive niches, presumably for candles, in the walls. Mr Harlow points out “the distinctive Kentish layout of walled garden on one side and farm on the other”. Here there is a neat trio of buildings around a little grass court.

Swanton Farm House, or Holliday Hall, is clearly a place where much enjoyable entertaining has gone on over the years. We were feasted with crayfish sandwiches, followed by triangles of white bread filled with spinach, foie gras and fig, and then blinis with a dollop of strawberry jam and double cream. This is a house demanding a new owner with style.

PASS NOTES

THE main front of Holliday Hall is a glorious display of virtuoso brickwork with red brick dressings to the windows and an orangey “rubbed” brick for the window heads, arches and the “aprons” beneath the windows. Rubbed bricks are smoother, thinner, crisp-edged bricks made with carefully sieved clay that eliminates the little pebbles that would otherwise leave the surface pitted when the bricks rub against one another. The art lies in laying the bricks in a lime putty mortar using a minimum of sand and achieving a joint no thicker than a knife blade rather than the wodge of marzipan favoured by modern builders. Bricks are laid end on and longways, but narrower “queen starters” are used in the brickwork around the windows to create a regular pattern.

The house is for sale for £1.25 million through Strutt & Parker, 01227 451123

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