Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
ONE day in January 1938, Christopher Hussey, then Editor of COUNTRY LIFE, went to visit Birchens Spring near Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, a newly built country house in the Chilterns designed for C. Rissik by John Campbell, a little-known English architect, and built by Messrs William Hartley of Slough. Writing in COUNTRY LIFE (January 29 and February 5, 1938), Hussey was greatly impressed by the originality and maturity of Birchens Spring’s design, which combines ‘something of the provincial Roman villa, something of the English manor house, and something, too, of “modern”’. Why, he wondered, had we never heard of Campbell before? The answer was simple—‘because he was not here’. At least, not that often, his life story reveals.
John Archibald Campbell (1878–1948) was born in Wolverhampton, where he studied and later taught at the School of Art. In 1902, he met Heinrich Pössenbacher, the son of a Munich interior decorator, who offered him a job as chief designer. In July 1914, Campbell was appointed regius professor of Architecture at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich, Germany. However, the outbreak of war that year saw him interned for the duration before being repatriated to Britain in August 1918.
Between 1922 and 1928, Campbell was a partner in Falconer, Baker & Campbell, based at Amberley in the Cotswolds, where the practice designed several houses in the Arts-and-crafts tradition. The partnership was dissolved in 1928, after which Campbell opened an office in Berlin. However, the
economic depression of 1931 forced his return to England where he settled in Cornwall. Here, between 1934 and 1939, he built three houses, similar in style to Birchens Spring, on the headland at Chapel Point, Mevagissey. It was typical of the ill luck that dogged his life that Campbell fell from the cliff and died in August 1948, when returning to Chapel Point after posting the papers for a planning appeal to continue the development.
During the 1950s, Birchens Spring was owned by a charitable trust, which ran it as a home for the children of parents suffering from TB. Following its closure, the neglected house was acquired in 1960 by the actor Dirk Bogarde, who, according to an article in House & Garden (August 1961), renamed it Drummers Yard after ‘a charming lead figure of a 17th-century French drummer boy that had followed Bogarde from house to house’. Concealed from the road by ‘birches, oaks, chestnuts and a positive barricade of rhododendrons,’ the imposing stone house stood ‘looking rather like a prison, with chipped grey stucco and rusting ironwork gradually succumbing to the onslaught of the untamed woods.’ Inside, ‘it had been precisely yet hideously partitioned-off into a warren of half-glazed, cream-painted corridors, inscriptions and injunctions’.
Fortunately, apart from the removal of these partitions, there was little rebuilding to be done and the house was soon white-washed, its ironwork glistening black against the grey slate roof and the most intrusive trees cut back to give a breathing space of lawn between house and woods. The entire renovation was planned and supervised by Bogarde himself in between bouts of filming.
Two years later, he sold Drummers Yard to his friends and associates, Peter Rogers, the producer of the 31 ‘Carry On’ films, and his wife, Betty E. Box, who produced the ‘Doctor’ series of films that helped make a star of the young Bogarde.
Some 30 years later, Rogers sold Drummers Yard, listed Grade II, to a property developer who was fascinated by its origins and set out to reverse alterations made during the Rogers era. In 1997, he sold the house to the present owner, whose much-loved family home it has been for the past 27 years. During that time, he and his wife modernised and upgraded the interior and created the delightful gardens that surround the house, with lightly wooded grounds to the south and east flanking a series of water gardens that flow down to a pond.
Now for sale through James Crawford of Knight Frank (020–7861 1065) who quotes a guide price of ‘excess £10 million’, Campbell’s dream lives on in the ‘strangely simple shapes’ of the beautifully proportioned main house, which offers 10,422sq ft of light, bright and airy accommodation on three floors, including three principal reception rooms, a study, kitchen/breakfast room, seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Further accommodation is provided in a detached two-bedroom cottage built on the site of an original set of outbuildings.
At the southern end of the Chilterns National Landscape, Nick Warner of Knight Frank in Henley-on-thames (01491 844901) is handling the sale, for the first time in 40 years, of the wonderfully private Great David’s in the hamlet of Kingwood, Oxfordshire, five miles west of Henley and 10 miles from Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
It was renamed after a “charming figure of a French drummer boy that followed Bogarde from house to house”
The charming Edwardian house, which is unlisted, stands in 10¾ acres of immaculate gardens and grounds, surrounded by open farmland and pockets of privately owned beech woodland. It is for sale at a guide price of £5m for the house with 6¾ acres and an additional 4½-acre paddock is available by separate negotiation.
Built by the Maxwell family in about 1909, Great David’s was acquired in 1984 by the present owner, who then had it beautifully redesigned internally with bespoke Philip Koomen joinery throughout. The house offers 5,339sq ft of accommodation on three floors, including a large reception hall, drawing room, wood-panelled dining room, and a comfortable snug that leads into a Smallbone-designed family kitchen. The first floor houses six bedrooms and three bathrooms, with a large study, bathroom and attics on the second floor.
Brigstock Manor has medieval origins as a hunting lodge in the Royal Forest
The gardens and grounds, originally laid out by the Maxwell family, were revived in the early 1980s by the owner’s wife, who worked with landscape architect Ian Teh to develop the rose garden and re-establish the herbaceous borders. The family’s passion for sport is evident in the range of facilities at Great David’s, which include a cricket net, tennis court, swimming pool and pool house. The pièce de résistance is the croquet lawn, which the owner’s wife had dug up and years ago. re-seeded some 25 Maintained since then by professional greenkeepers, it’s been the setting each July for a private tournament attended by the country’s leading players, including a former world champion.
The great forests of England have long been the preserve of the country’s royal and ancient families, who built hunting lodges in secluded woodland areas. Among the most picturesque is Grade Ii*-listed Brigstock Manor, set in four acres of gorgeous gardens on the edge of the conservation village of Brigstock, near Kettering, Northamptonshire, which has medieval origins as a hunting lodge within the Royal Forest of Rockingham. It is now for sale through Barclay Macfarlane of Savills (07870 867218) at a guide price of £3m.
According to its Historic England listing, the present manor was probably built by Thomas Montague in the late 15th century and extended by Roger Montague in the mid 16th century. It later passed to the Dukes of Buccleuch, who had it restored in the mid 18th century and extended in the late 1880s by Northamptonshire architect J. A. Gotch. From 1936 to 1945, it was home to the film producer and director Herbert Wilcox, one of Britain’s leading film-makers from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thereafter, it was owned by British Steel until 1998, when it again reverted to private residential use.
The present owners, who acquired Brigstock Manor in 2018, have completed a meticulous, eight-year-long refurbishment of the entire manor, which boasts many period pieces of note, among them the fine Jacobean main staircase, the 13th-century Great Hall and the vaulted first-floor Solar or drawing room. In all, it offers 9,700sq ft of elegant, well-ordered living space, including four grand reception rooms, a Bronte fitted kitchen and adjoining diner on the ground floor; the Solar, family room, four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the first floor; and four further bedrooms and two family bathrooms on the second floor.