This is one of the more surprising new country houses I’ve seen for a long time. When the moneyed classes build one-off homes in rural England, they generally fall into two camps: there is the metropolitan-minded minority that chooses modernism in all its forms, and there is the more traditional country-living majority that opts for the column-and-pediment classical style, the traditional embodiment of wealth.
But what’s this? A new farmhouse, on a hillside overlooking the Test Valley in Hampshire, designed by a classical architect, but that consciously evokes the Arts and Crafts movement.
To be exact, it revisits the early style of the great Victorian and Edwardian architect Sir Edwin Lutyens when he was still mightily influenced by the new take on tradition provided by Arts and Crafts. Later, Lutyens was to abandon this in favour of a starchier classical approach. But his early houses were exuberant, bravura examples of domestic architecture (his 1904 Marshcourt house, eccentrically built from the local chalk, is just down the road). And it is this verve that classicist Robert Adam has captured at Penny Lane Farm.
It’s a real farm — 97 acres of rolling Hampshire downland with wonderful views, and scarcely another house in sight, despite being close to the perfectly-preserved town of Stockbridge. Owners Kate and Nick Measham have contracted out the farming, but Kate, herself a farmer’s daughter, knows the ropes and drives you with aplomb around the fields and copses in her Land Rover.
Where the house now stands, there used to be a row of three red-painted corrugated-steel barns, part of a complex of farm buildings. Attached to this was a large bungalow. After the Meashams bought the farm in 1997, they sold the barns — which were taken down and re-erected nearby — and lived in the bungalow while the new house was built. They like a project. Because now, with the last part of the house only recently completed, they are selling up with a view to getting a riverside property nearby to do up — Nick is a keen angler, and the Test Valley is famous for its fishing. So, for an asking price of £2.6m, you could get a Lutyens-revival house and a lot of land — though there’s talk of maybe selling off the farmland in lots since not everybody would want all those fields.
The barns weren’t a pretty sight, and the house is lower than they were, so there is no question that this is one rural development that actively improves its setting. It punches above its weight, too: all the clever architectural modelling makes it seem quite a large mansion when, in fact, it’s a ground-hugging five-bedroom house with big roofs and tall chimneys.
Okay, so the downstairs rooms aren’t exactly small. The kitchen/breakfast room at the heart of the house is about 18 feet square. The main drawing room occupies the whole of the lower end of the house and is 30ft x 19ft — with a tall timbered ceiling rising to the underside of the roof. There’s a 17ft x 17ft dining room, a small sitting room, a study. Most of these rooms would be bigger still were it not for the big feature of the interior — the long, broad entrance hall running right along the front of the house and gently stepping down as it goes, off which the rooms open. Meanwhile, in an attached wing round the corner, a big brick building kept from the old farm complex, there is the ultimate games room. It’s 36ft long and more than 17ft wide and almost too tall. You could build a mezzanine, or indeed an entire self-contained flat, in there.
Upstairs — and it’s a hell of a staircase, with Lutyens-esque square bays projecting front and rear — the bedrooms are relatively small, being set into the roof. It’s quite intentional, says Kate. The idea is that the three teenage children of the house have plenty of family space downstairs, rather than having to lurk in their rooms.
But it’s as a complete composition that you have to consider the house, rather than individual elements. “I really felt that Bob enjoyed doing this,” says Kate of her architect, and that’s the impression I get, too. The Measham and Adam families are friends and, although Adam’s firm is a big one these days, with several colleagues each designing houses individually, this one was entirely the work of the boss.
“I told him we didn’t want any columns or pediments,” says Kate, “and we wanted it to fit in with local houses such as Marshcourt. But we didn’t want anything to be directly copied.”
As the house evolved — using relatively local materials such as flint, Michelmersh handmade bricks and Purbeck limestone, plus lots of solid oak — it became an exercise in designing à la Lutyens. The square oak-framed bays, the tall chimneys (each one different) and, above all, that long entrance hall with its timber arches and shallow vaulted ceiling, all evoke the spirit of Lutyens, with more than a touch of the medieval tithe barn thrown in for good measure. It might be pastiche, but it’s very high-quality pastiche.
Actually, Adam did sneak in a few columns. There are plain square oak ones marching down the hall, and there is an entirely unnecessary cylindrical brick one outside the back door into the farmyard — plainly put there as an amiable provocation. There is a shallow square “handkerchief dome” ceiling over your head as you arrive through the broad front door, reminiscent of the Georgian classical architect Sir John Soane. It’s all very understated — the classical orders are conspicuously absent.
It’s a high-risk game Adam is playing here, style-wise. To be so well known as a classicist, and then to break out in a rumbustious new direction, is a bit like Norman Foster suddenly abandoning his steel-and-glass high-tech approach in favour of heavyweight masonry. But it’s also clever. Because by doing a full-blooded exercise in the Arts and Crafts style, Adam widens his appeal across the constituency of traditionally minded wealthy clients.
For me, the key move in the house is the boldest and also the simplest. By making that generous hall run the full length of the front of the house, Adam much reduces the space available in the rooms opening off it. But they’re big enough, after all. The hall — which like much of the rest of the house is hung with paintings by Kate, the farmer’s daughter who went to art school — imparts a sense of nobility to the whole design. The way it is stepped makes it a dynamic space. And, as Measham points out, it’s far from unusable. They can put long tables in it and turn it into the ultimate party room.
The house is a fully functioning home as it stands. Already weathering nicely, its newness is toning down. But you could also see it as a continuing project. If this is a modern Lutyens, then where is the modern equivalent of his garden-designing partner, Gertrude Jekyll? About 10 acres of new woodland have been planted by the Meashams — the local wildlife, from deer to buzzards, is loving it — but there is virtually nothing by way of gardens. And there are still some less than wonderful agricultural buildings remaining right next door that could be replaced with an extension to the house — the equivalent of a stable courtyard, perhaps.
But what should not be changed is the house’s sense of slight austerity. Yes, it is luxurious in the sense of high-quality space and design (even the wine cellar has a high ceiling). But it is not ostentatious, inside or out. There is no bling to it. Colours inside are very muted, the stairs are bare oak, the fireplaces, though big, are relatively plain. There is no hot tub, no swimming pool, though there is a tennis court (and Nick looks at one tree-girt field and ponders the practicability of a cricket pitch). The vocation of farming may be on the wane in Hampshire — “countryside stewardship” is what it’s all about now — but, funnily enough, as the dogs wander in and out in the April sunshine, this feels like it really could be a working farmhouse.
- Penny Lane Farm is on sale through Knight Frank, Winchester, 01962 850 333, www.knightfrank.com; Robert Adam architects: 01962 843 843, www.robertadamarchitects.com
