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Architects Country Houses

Lissan House Cookstown Tyrone + Nicholas Groves-Raines

Got Plastered | A Rendering

1 Lissan House © lvbmag.com

On a recent visit to Polesden Lacey in Surrey the lawns resembled a scene from a Baz Luhrmann movie. In the sweltering heat, a jazz band serenaded hordes of picnickers, sightseers and sunbathers on the lawn. All that was missing was Gatsby romancing Daisy in the loggia. Another recent trip was to Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, once England’s least known country house. On a misty day, not only was the car park full but the fields had been turned into an overflow. Tours of the house were timed to avoid overcrowding.

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A visit to Lissan House in Tyrone earlier this summer couldn’t have been more different. On a bright Saturday afternoon, the place was as deserted as when the last owner Hazel Dolling née Staples lived there alone. Wuthering Heights with neither Heathcliff nor Cathy at home. Is it a general Irish malaise about the gentry while across the water, brown sign hunters in their Hunters queue to see how the other 0.1% lived? Admittedly both National Trust houses mentioned are close to conurbations while Lissan House is miles from anywhere. The nearest town is Cookstown which reputedly has the widest street in Ireland. Population circa 11,000.

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“I hope you felt privileged to have it all to yourselves,” begins Nicholas Groves-Raines. His architectural practice was responsible for the recent restoration of the house. “Lissan is a hidden, secret place and that is part of its great charm. It is well off the main tourist routes, the M1 and M2, and away from the tourist centres such as the north coast and Belfast, making it harder to entice visitors. However it is used by the local community and on a number of occasions they have even had to employ overspill parking for events.”

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He explains, “The works recently completed at Lissan are only a first phase of a larger scheme to redevelop the demesne and bring all of the derelict buildings back into use as funds allow. In the next few years, it is hoped that Lissan will become a much more lively place whilst retaining its unique character. It would be good to firmly place Lissan House on the tourist map of Northern Ireland.” Lissan had its 15 inches of fame back in 2007 when Mrs Dolling fronted the campaign to win funding on the TV programme Restoration. In the end it lost out to Manchester’s Victoria Baths. Again a case of population density influencing situations.

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Witnessing early on in his career the needless destruction of historic town centres and buildings in the name of progress persuaded Nicholas to specialise in conservation. “I am now an accredited conservation architect but work on a variety of projects including new builds,” he says. Nicholas puts his money where his mouth is: Lamb’s House to be precise. That is his Grade A listed office, an early 17th century Scottish baronial pile in Edinburgh.

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Newhailes, just outside Edinburgh, is like Lissan,” Nicholas continues. “Now run by the National Trust for Scotland as a visitor attraction, it too was used as a family house until recently. Newhailes is a time capsule from the 18th century, having changed little from that period. Like much of Lissan, it remains pretty much as it was when the Trust acquired it. The house hasn’t been ‘restored’ as such, having only had essential repairs carried out to preserve it for the future.”

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The exterior of Lissan House has changed, though. Out, mostly, went the casement windows. Gone is the one shade of grey of the walls. Nicholas relates, “Early photographs show the house had sash and case windows until the late 19th century. A few sashes had been reused in the buildings, so we did have good examples of the original detailing to work from. The modern casements were constructed from inferior quality timber and were not weatherproof due to poor workmanship and rot. They were crudely fitted into the former sash boxes that were still built into the walls. The majority were beyond repair and so a decision had to be made about what form the new windows should take. Sashes were installed to match the originals. The few windows that are not now sashes were part of a late 19th century extension.”

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The cement based render also dated from the late 19th century. “It was in poor condition and holding dampness in the walls,” he says. “There was ample evidence of the original lime render and off-white limewash remaining in sheltered areas, backed up by early photographs that confirmed the house had previously been lighter in colour. The new lime render and limewash allow the walls to breathe and should protect the house for many years to come. Limewash helps to prolong the life of lime render.”

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Despite its size, the 28 bedroom Lissan House is somewhat vernacular rather than grand in nature. Davis Ducart may have been responsible for the ornamental bridge but not the house. “The Staples family were originally industrialists rather than landed gentry,” says Nicholas. “Early visitors to the house mention a noisy forge nearby where locally mined iron was worked. Lissan started out as a much smaller house that was extended again and again over the centuries as money and tastes dictated. Unlike many mansions it was not built in a single phase to the designs of a professional architect or master builder. It is an accumulation of its varied history.” Lissan House Trustees now look after the house and estate.

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Nicholas ends, “Lissan is unique and contains relics and remnants from all of its past, some of which are probably still hidden.” Visible charming quirks and quirky charms include the suspended glazed corridor to the rear resembling a train carriage mid air. The standalone bow fronted coachman’s room linked only to the front of the house by the arched canopy of the porte-cochère. The amber paned double glazed bay window bulging out of the side elevation. Best of all is the staircase which consumes all three-and-a-half storeys of the cavernous main hall with more dog legs than Crufts.

Lissan House © Stuart Blakley

Categories
Country Houses People

Lavender’s Blue + Twilight

Feeling Blue 

Janice Porter at Twilight © lvbmag.com

Twilight. The seeping of day into night. Flux made manifest. A liminal state, a period of transformation, optical and psychological. As light fades, our eyes play tricks on us, inventing horizons, altering distances, shrouding landmarks. We become more obscure to ourselves as well. Soon we are diner, dancer, lover. But in this moment, the night is not so much young as hardly begun.

There’s palpable tension in this transition between our day and night selves. In Laughter in the Dark, Vladimir Nabokov’s doomed character Albinus experiences it on a visit to his mistress. “Lights were being put on, and their soft orange glow looked very lovely in the pale dusk. The sky was still quite blue, with a single salmon coloured cloud in the distance, and all this unsteady balance between light and dusk made Albinus feel giddy.”

For lost souls, the magic hour passes unobserved, pre empted by the explicit reds of sunset; or its nuances eclipsed by the acid glow of streetlights. F Scott Fitzgerald beautifully captures the melancholy of fading day in The Great Gatsby when his narrator Nick Carraway observes, “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

The subtle apostrophe-free lavender blue of twilight deserves to be the scene snatcher. Even the words associated with it are seductive: crepuscular, gloaming, penumbra. Little wonder the Romantics Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth – were obsessed about fixing twilight as a poetic shortcut to existential meditations. “The violet hour” as TS Eliot writes in The Waste Land is “when the eyes and back turn upward from the desk”. Just dwell on yet more literary episodes imbued with meaning: Mrs Dalloway kissing Sally Seton on the terrace, Mrs Moore’s moment of transcendence in A Passage to India, Marlow’s mistruth about Kurtz’s last words in Heart of Darkness. Not to mention the hotbed of nefarious doings at twilight in gothic novels, from Dracula to Frankenstein.

Twilight. The time when the power of reason wanes and fantasy weaves its own tales. Full of frisson, danger, desire. Moral and social strictures loosen as the first stars appear. Under the diffusion of mauve light there is heightened sensitivity to the promise of life; anything is possible in this magic hour. Grasp it, for the intensity is almost tangible; feel it, before going forth into the night, both derivative and original, living in the present yet loving the past.

Lavender's Blue Twilight © lvbmag.com

Categories
Architecture Design Restaurants Town Houses

Savannah Tour of Homes + Gardens

Midday in the Garden of Good and Evil 

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Savannah may be famed for its St Patrick’s Day revelry, the second largest in the US, but hot on its heels every year comes another celebration: Savannah Tour of Homes and Gardens. Presented by (breathe in) The Women of Christ Church and Historic Savannah Foundation in cooperation with Ardsley Park Chatham Crescent Garden Club (breathe out), this venerable tradition has been a highlight of the city’s calendar for more than three quarters of a century.

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Each year, a selection of Savannah’s finest residences is featured on the tour. It’s quite a status symbol to have your home included. Crowds make their way across the city’s famous squares which mostly aren’t as large as you might think. More Soho Square than St Stephen’s Green. Like everything in Savannah, half the fun is meeting the people. Earlier in the day we got talking to the table next to us in Café Scad. “Eliza Thompson Inn,” we responded when asked where we were staying. “Ah – it’s haunted! Eliza? She’ll make ya dance!”

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The formidable Women of Christ Church were no exception, revelling in their role as guides alongside the indomitable maîtresses de maison. “Y’all, we tell everyone that’s Vivienne Leigh’s grandmother!” exclaimed one, pointing to the portrait of a feisty brunette over the fireplace. “We’ve no idea who she really is!” Many of the homes were ideal for one way circular pedestrian flow thanks to steps leading up to an entrance door on the piano nobile and a secondary exit at street level. Woe betide anyone who walked across a manicured lawn. Or tried to skip a room on the heavily policed circuits. We accidentally – honestly – missed a front parlour. We were instantly summonsed back: “Y’all get back inside ya little lawbreakers!” Meek obedience seemed like the safest response, stopping to purposefully admire the oh-so-perfectly arranged Fabergé dinner set en route.

Every interior style – House and Garden, Period Living, Wallpaper*, World of Interiors – was represented. Behind one of the shuttered antebellum exteriors was a gallery of Jeff Koons sculptures. A colonial façade gave way to enough Beidermeier to stock a small museum. “A palm tree growing in a dust bin,” announced an august guide with a straight-as-a-poker face. “Just a typical teenager’s room.” A few doors down, an exquisitely apparelled hostess whisked us into her house with a powerful sweep of her modestly white gloved hand. “Welcome to the grandest house on East Jones Street!”

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“I’ve painted the front door red,” stated another. “What’s the significance of red?” she demanded. “Eh, danger?” we gingerly suggested. “No, why no, it’s for Southern hospitality!” and swiftly guided us onto the pavement. With that in mind, we headed off into the afternoon sunshine for some grits and shrimps on Monterey Square, washed down with iced margaritas. Dinner – Cajun blend of crawfish at Alligator Soul or crab stuffed Portobello at Paula Deen’s The Lady and Sons? First world problem.

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