northanger abbey – Lavender's Blue

Carlow Sweet Chariot

Every view of this multifaceted castle unveils a different vein. The gunpowder grey entrance front: rectilinear massing and rhythmic rows of windows. The steel grey driveway elevation: 12th century abbey ruins and pointy dormers between turrets. The bleached white courtyard: a picturesque jumble of crow stepped gables and battlemented bow windows. The sunburnt terracotta garden front: pillared arches and stygian loggias swinging low under cantilevered boxy glasshouses. Ever since 1826, when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce fixed the image of his family courtyard in Gras on a bitumen glass plate, architecture and photography have been fond bedfellows. This is despite one being about static volumes and the other decisive moments. Yet is even Huntington Castle beyond expression in a hackneyed Hockney Polaroid collage, provenance and ambiance rarely surviving the transition from three dimensions to two? Ancestors of the Durdin Robertsons include Lord Rosse founder of the Hellfire Club, flame haired Grace O’Malley Pirate Queen of Connaught and, a little further back, Noah’s niece Mrs Benson. Notable visitors darkening its doors over the years have included WB Yeats, Mick Jagger, Hugh Grant and Lavender’s Blue. But even more notably, the Durdin Robertsons are still very much in residence.

The same cannot be said, it seems, for just about every other country house in Ireland. Heritage is crumbling. No one’s picnicking, foreign or indigenous, in this land. One person who knows all too well is chartered building surveyor and architectural historian Frank Keohane. He’s been tasked with compiling Buildings of Ireland Four Cork, the Irish version of a Pevsner Guide. “I’ve a sneaking suspicion that more books are sold on ruins than intact country houses,” Frank ruminates. “Take the semi derelict Loftus Hall which is really exposed near a cliff on the Wexford coast. The owner does ghost tours – ‘the devil’ comes for dinner, and so on. But you need to be practical, ok? Ruins may photograph well but sooner or later if left they disappear. I hope it’s a section in Loftus Hall’s history and not the final chapter.”

Frank records, “Out of the 545 entries in Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland, 18 have been ‘restored’. But I use the term loosely. Dunboy Castle, immortalised by Daphne du Maurier in Hungry Hill, was to be converted into a six star hotel. Horrific extensions were added though! Lough Eske would have collapsed if it hadn’t been rebuilt and converted into a hotel but it’s a bit trim and prim for me. Kilronan Castle has been loosely restored with an extension in a pseudo style of what I don’t know. The shell of Killeen Castle has been restored but lies empty surrounded by a golf course. Dromore Castle, of international importance, still in ruins. Bellamont Forest, Carriglas, Hazelwood, Whitfield Court, contents of Bantry House… all at risk. At least at Killua Castle the family have started by restoring and moving into the wing.” He highlights that Monkstown Castle has fortunately been saved by Cork County Council.

Huntington Castle is now home to Alexander Durdin Robertson, his artist wife Clare and their sons Herbert, Edmonde and Caspar, following a sojourn near Northcote Road in London. Alex’s mother lives in the coachman’s cottage in the courtyard. Built as a garrison in the 1620s and extended right up to the 1920s, it was converted to a home in 1673 by the first and last Lord Esmonde, passing by marriage into the descendants of the current incumbents. Restored 17th century terraced formal Italian gardens, rectangles of lawn and a circular pond, darkly orchidaceous in the majestic last December, wrap around the castle like ghostly folds of a billowing crinoline dress. A 600 year old silent avenue of tall French lime trees connects the castle to Clonegal. The village guards a pass through the Blackstairs Mountains where Counties Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow collide. “Mandoran,” as Lady Olivia Robertson would say. “County Westcommon,” as Molly Keane would call it. Clonegal is cute as a cupcake – a river runs through it – with pretty Georgian terraces. The only discordant note is a smattering of uPVC framed windows, the plastic scourge of heritage.

Alex’s great grandfather was the last architect to alter the building, making minor changes and erecting concrete framed greenhouses in the kitchen garden. Manning Robertson was not just a mere architect but an influential town planner and writer. He produced plans for Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, Cork and Limerick, introducing the concept of welfare homes, when the profession was in its infancy. The journey from modern to modernism to modernity had begun. Town planning mightn’t be the sexiest of subjects but his seminal 1924 book Everyday Architecture, as well as being aeons ahead of its time, is a riot, full of titillating tips and illuminating ruminations. “Unfortunately uneducated taste is nearly always bad.” Or, “The glazing of a well proportioned window is divided into vertical panes; one horizontal window might be tolerated in a village, just as no village is complete without its idiot, but the whimsical should never usurp the place of the normal.” Unexpected chapter headings shout “Slippery Jane”, “On Lies and Evasions” and “Smoke, Filth, and Fog”.

Manning’s daughter Olivia inherited his talent for writing and published five books. Field of the Stranger, a highly original read, won the London Book Society Choice award in 1948. Another polymath, an explorer of psychic areas, a landed cosmonaut, she illustrated her novel with her own wildly witty black ink drawings. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh out loud at priceless passages such as Olivia’s description of the antics of a fortune teller, “She’s great at it – once she told Margaret how she saw a bright change coming, and Margaret got the job in Dublin in no time after.” Another literary gem worthy of Hunderby is the incident of the wart. “I knew a young chap – he was a footman at Mount Charles – and he had a wart, and he was ashamed to hand round the plates on account of his wart. I was always warning him not to meddle with it, but he cut it, and what happened but he got the jaw-lock and died in a fearful manner, twisted and turned like a shrimp, with his heels touching his head.” Arch humour continues with chat over afternoon tea about the perils of mixing tipples with talent. “’Why,’ declared Miss Pringle, ‘I have lived for many years in Booterstown, Dublin, and everybody knows that Dublin is swarming with writers and artists, most of them geniuses and all drinking themselves to death. I am told one cannot enter a public house without falling over them. Or them falling over you more likely.’” Strangers misbehaving.

The hilarity of an amateurs’ night out is accurately documented in a calamitous village play scene: “Amidst an excited murmuring, the curtain jerked spasmodically and slid up on the left side; our expectation was increased by a glimpse of a posed female chorus in plumed bonnets, violet velvet capes and white Empire gowns. The curtain fell. There was another jerk, and this time the right hand curtain jumped up coquettishly, only to sag back to its comrade… As if to show that they had only been joking, the curtains suddenly fled dramatically apart…” Her tragicomedy reaches a crescendo when the chorus starts belting out The Charladies’ Ball in “nightmarish counterpoint”. Who will survive?

Olivia fretted in her prizewinning novel about the disappearance of country houses: “I was afraid that Mount Granite might fall a prey to house demolishers, who were exploiting the temporary shortage of materials by buying up eyesores, gaping roofless to the weather. I had seen so many wreckages of architecture, besides rare specimen trees felled and sold for firewood, that I was fearful such a fate might befall the Wilderness.” Three decades later John Cornforth would worry in Country Life, “A policy for historic houses seems to be much harder to work out in Ireland than in England for historical as well as economic reasons, and places of the importance of Castletown, County Kildare, and Malahide Castle, County Dublin, have only survived through lucky last ditch operations, organised in the first case by Mr Desmond Guinness and the Irish Georgian Society, and in the second by Dublin Tourism in conjunction with the National Gallery and Dublin County Council.” As Frank Keohane observes, hotelisation was nearly as great a threat as demolition during the crazy boom years. One word: Carton. Two words: Farnham House. Saved, but at what a cost. Love | Hate. Such Ballyhoo. Wish they were Luton Hoo. Anyhoo. It can be done and undone. Three syllables. Ballyfin.

It’s all about Huntington this wintry weekend. First sight of the castle is a romantic fairy tale come true. A mosaic of yellow squares (in 1888 the house was the first in Ireland to have electricity installed) flickers through a veil beyond the Pale of leafless spidery trees entwined with Celtic mist and mysticism. It’s crowned by jagged toothed battlements (spaces for fairies) silhouetted against the melancholic velvety sky. Country Life, Tatler and Vogue are stacked up in coffee table-demolishing piles. Huntington is so photogenic it could easily be the cover boy of all three. A pair of peacocks, two pigs, two cats (Nutmeg and Spook), two lurchers (Country Life’s “guilty pleasure”) and three dachshunds (but no partridge in a pear tree) greet strangers. There are flowers on the first floor and soldiers in the attic. Only the latter are dead, strangers in the night. “I believe time is spiral,” confides Alex. “It’s linked to quantum mechanics. When apparitions appear they’re like jumbled video clips out of sequence.” He leads ghost tours at Halloween and the house and gardens are open to the public most of the year round. The castle must pay for its keep (pun). “We’ve developed bed and breakfast around this tourism. These houses drink money. It costs €25 an hour to heat Huntington. We’re not suitable for weddings and turning the house into a venue would destroy the fabric.”

Twin gilt mirrors in the drawing room frame back-to-front latticework, crewelwork, fretwork, trestlework, needlework and a piece a’ work. Reflections in the glass; reflections of the past. “The Aubusson tapestries are incredibly all done by hand,” relates Alex. “They’re a real show of wealth, of opulence. The arrow slit window cut into one of the tapestries is a retained feature of the original castle.” It’s Friday night. Time for dinner. Outdoors, the gardens slowly disappear into the tender coming night. Whatsoever things are lovely, think on these things. The dining room is dim with haunted shadow, walls fading through a glass darkly to trompe l’oeil in a mirage of Bedouin tent hangings and a fanfare of fanlights. Centuries of ancestors in oil paintings watch the strangers in the room, forever a room of their own:

Barbara for one has never left Huntington. Dinner by candlelight is served. Winter salad with goat’s cheese and soda bread, beetroot aplenty, for starter. Salmon steak, creamed Wexford potatoes and seasonal vegetables with dill mayonnaise is the main event, a rhapsody to the countryside. “We use eggs from our own hens,” notes Alex. Pudding is elderflower posset (raspberries on top; Florentine to the side) just as good as Culpeper’s in Spitalfields lemon variety. Which is very good indeed. Both times it’s a work of quaffable art.

And so to bed. Leaving behind the dying embers of the day, the journey, as rambling as this article, takes sighing twists and tiring turns along narrow wainscot lined passages and staircases heavily hung with armoury and taxidermy and history. “That snouty crocodile,” points Alex, “was shot by Great Aunt Nora.” The naming of bedrooms is a rather charming country house tradition. In clockwise order, the principal bedrooms at the recently sold Drenagh, a Sir Charles Lanyon special marooned in the mosses of Limavady, are Orange Room, Monroe Room, Bow Room, Blue Room, Balcony Room, South Room, Green Room, Rose Room, Yew Room, Chinese Room, McQuillan Room, McDonnel Room and Clock Room. At Huntington, in any (very) old order, the principal bedrooms are similarly named after colours and features: Blue Room, Green Room, Yellow Room, White Room, Red Room Mount and Leinster Room. As Ned Lutyens once remarked, “I am most excited about towels.” He’d love the bathrooms here. They’re the first resort, the last word, something to blog home about, fit for the life of Tony O’Reilly. Elizabethan style plasterwork ain’t the norm for an en suite. Yep. It is here. Slumber in a four poster bed comes swiftly. But the solemn blackness of the night is rudely interrupted by bloodcurdling screeching. Yikes! Is it a banshee?

It’s Sunday morning. “That noise you heard the first night is an owl’s mating call,” Alex confirms. Phew. The agony (of leaving Huntington) and the eggs to see (for breakfast). But London’s calling, a city full of strangers. Contemporary Indian architect Charles Correa considers, “Film is very close to architecture. Both are dealing with the way light falls on an object and defines it but the difference is time. A director can create huge shifts in emotion with a jump-cut or an edit but architecture cannot move, so an architect can’t produce those sudden shifts. On the other hand, that stillness is also a magnificent property.” Nowhere is as magnificently still as the otherworldliness of Huntington Castle. Rooms and gardens and gardens in rooms and rooms in gardens have evolved at an imperceptible pace over half a millennium. That wonderfully liveable layering of history inherent in homes such as architectural supremo Fergus Flynn-Rogers’ Omra Park, clinging unselfconsciously to the crooked coastline of Omeath, is apparent upon first entering the house. The unmistakable patina of age, authenticity whatever that is, once lost when the marquee of contents is auctioned and the green neon ‘Fire Exit’ sign flashes above the entrance door, is impossible to replicate. A proper ancestral pile. A gothic pastoral ideal. A place of Arcadian awakening. Not too trim and prim. Frank Keohane would approve. So very Northanger Abbey. So very Castle Rackrent. So very Fern Hill. So very Danielstown. So very Elgin Lodge. So very Huntington Castle. Whisper it. So very.

Making the Grade

Question. What are the only two Grade I Listed Buildings in London to be converted into apartments? Answer. St Pancras Hotel, King’s Cross (the upper floors) and Roehampton House, south London (all of it). They couldn’t be more different. Harry Potter versus Brideshead. Northanger versus Mansfield. Gothic versus baroque. St Martin’s versus Queen Mary’s. Gritty regeneration hotspot v leafy southwest suburbia. The one thing they do share, along with all fellow listed buildings, is the challenge of adapting to suit contemporary lifestyles. Dreaming up a bedroom out of a circular space for Apartment 15 was just one minor Roehampton House brainstorming success. An island of wardrobes backing onto a freestanding wall solved the what-about-storage and where-do-we-put-the-bed dilemma in one fell swoop.

City boy Thomas Cary seemingly built the original block in 1713. Thomas Archer was the architect. City boy Arthur Grenfell seamlessly added new wings in 1913. Edwin Lutyens was the architect. City developer St James seamlessly reimagined the enlarged house as 21 apartments in 2013. Nick Davies was the architect. This heritage asset has never looked hotter, set off by pristine landscaping. Not a leaf out of place. The twin gatehouses have been revived and six contemporary garden villas continue the fine building tradition. Now for more questions and answers with the latest architect to display his talent at Roehampton House.

Why did you choose to buy and develop this site considering the inevitable costs and constraints of retaining a Grade I Listed Building?

“When Roehampton House and the former Queen Mary’s Hospital site came to the market, St James was the only organisation from the parties bidding who recognised that once restored the house could create real value. Plus it is a magnificent setting and centrepiece for the adjoining new development. All the other parties saw the house as too great a challenge. St James was the only party who was serious about taking on the restoration and conversion of the Grade I historic building.”

What were the specific challenges relating to retention and conversion of the Listed Building? “Grade I Listed Buildings are comparatively rare. They comprise less than three percent of all Listed properties and in law everything extant at the point of Listing is protected. As with all older buildings, many changes and additions had been made over the years. The challenge of unravelling what should be retained and what can be changed is a long process of evaluation and discussion with English Heritage and the local borough conservation team. There was a desire to restore many of the original rooms that had been subdivided to their original proportions, particularly the panelled rooms that had survived in the Georgian part of the building. St James removed an intrusive steel frame which had been put into the building to strengthen it in the 1980s and had destroyed much of the historic structure. We also needed to put approximately 50 new bathrooms and nearly half as many kitchens into a building which had had very few services whilst preserving and conserving as much of the surviving historic fabric as we could. That was quite challenging.”

Did you have to make any specific compromises to ensure compliance with the recognised heritage asset status of the Listed Building?

“The surviving pleasure grounds and walled gardens have been restored to their former glory and provide both the setting for the house and the framework around which the masterplan for the new surrounding development was shaped. The houses and apartments are traditional in design but not direct copies either in style or materials of the house itself. They also provide the transition between the character of the historic house and the adjoining suburban roads of Roehampton village which were developed in the early 20th century.”

Did the Listed Building context add value to the development as a whole?

“Although the costs of restoring a building such as Roehampton House are very significant, the sales values per square foot generated for the apartments have exceeded new build values so there is a genuine cachet for living in this type of historic property. It is also hard to quantify how much uplift the setting of the house has given to the sales prices in all the adjoining new properties but clearly they have also benefited from the overall setting and sense of place… their values reflect this. As with all historic buildings many of the problems you will encounter remain hidden from view. Control of costs is very hard with these unknowns. Many however can be anticipated with proper research and investigation into the history of the building. Using the right professional consultants and sourcing craftsmen skilled in historic building construction techniques is vitally important in managing this process and winning the support of English Heritage and the conservation officers.”

Why was such a contemporary style chosen specifically for the garden villas and how did the setting influence their final design?

“The design of the garden villas evolved from the discussions with English Heritage. Firstly, the rebuilding of the boundary wall on the north side of the pleasure grounds to reinstate this feature at the rear of Roehampton House had left a small piece of land. This land is sandwiched between the site boundary and the new hospital to the north. The original hospital buildings had in fact encroached into the area of the historic pleasure grounds. A key part of our planning strategy was to reinstate the grounds to safeguard the future setting of the house. English Heritage was very keen for this too so that the original frontage of the house could be kept clear of vehicles. To finance the cost of underground car parking it was agreed that a suitable form of development could be designed for the area now occupied by the villas. English Heritage was keen not to confuse the history of the house. It felt that a very simple contemporary design solution which sits quite low behind the wall and is quite self effacing is therefore an appropriate architectural response to the setting of the building. This raises all sorts of views about whether buildings in close proximity to listed buildings should be in the manner of them or totally contrasting and of their time. These are the philosophical discussions you always get into in matters of conservation.”

Are there any lessons that were learned from this project which St James will be applying to future projects?

“In restoring the building we had to respect the original hierarchy of the rooms in the house and the level of decorative detail that would have been present in these which we could put back, even where this had entirely disappeared during subsequent alterations in its later history. This even extended to us undertaking a full historic paint analysis of the most historic panelled rooms to understand the original decorative schemes that had existed when the house was built. There were three centuries to inform our choice of colours for decoration. Many of our big cost items were still hidden from us behind historic construction that we could not disturb prior to acquisition. If it can be arranged, pre acquisition survey work is essential in minimising risk and cost overruns. Even with the best knowledge it is not possible to anticipate all the problems you may encounter as you peel back the layers of history.”

What type of purchaser has been attracted to this development and do they differ from other St James developments?

“So far we have experienced a particular interest from local residents looking to stay in the area but downgrade on size. This is noticeably different to other St James developments which attract a more international audience. Perhaps because of Roehampton House’s heritage and Grade I listed status it draws more British buyers. This could also explain the interest from retired couples who like the idea of living in a grand country home but don’t want the upkeep.”

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