Times Literary Supplement (September 8, 2023): The new issue features Modern conspiracy theories, China’s Platonic republic, Jonathan Raban’s last days, Sebastian Faulks’s Neanderthal, the English country house, and more….
Video timeline: 00:00 – Boudoir: “The walls were covered with a green hessian” 02:30 – Saloon: “This is where we have our best parties” 05:29 – State Bedroom: “It’s really funny to have a state bedroom when your friends come and stay…” 06:17 – State Bathroom: “It’s not conventional to have a bath of this size” 07:30 – Kitchen: “You shouldn’t hide away beautiful things” 08:49 – Living Room: “This was the Walpole’s library” 09:57 – Picture Room: “A 20th-century collection of paintings”
Watch the full episode of Design Notes as we tour Wolterton Hall and Peter & Keith explain how they live in the Palladian rooms of the piano nobile, from the State Bathroom with its alabaster-panelled bath to the Saloon that looks out on 500 acres of parkland. #HouseTour #ManorHouse #CountryHouse #England #HomeDesign
Hunton Court is an ancient house hiding behind a breathtaking Georgian facade, and all set in a truly beautiful corner of Kent.
Take a quick look at Hunton Court — near Maidstone, in Kent — and you’d immediately mark it down as an 18th century country house. Yet its true origins lie many centuries earlier: it’s a building that hides its timbered origins behind a Georgian look.
The house, once known as Court Lodge, had a turbulent history: first built in the 13th century and part of an estate that had belonged to the Canterbury’s Christ Church Priory, it was handed to Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry VIII’s High Sheriff for Kent, after the Dissolution of Monasteries.
Vast and impersonal country houses, built to create an impression on visitors rather than bestow creature comforts on inhabitants, had been a feature of the English landscape long before Blenheim Palace. Yet this huge complex, the house alone encompassing seven acres of Oxfordshire on completion in 1725, bore comparison with the largest palaces of Europe.
Set to become the historic seat of the Dukes of Marlborough after Queen Anne gifted the manor of Woodstock to the 1st Duke, John Churchill, in 1705, as a reward for his military triumphs, it’s the only English country house — those of bishops aside — that has by longstanding popular consent been accorded the honorific title of palace (it was once described by some as Blenheim Castle).
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