The Georgian house

GEORGIAN GARDENER’S HOUSE
Norfolk

Two miles south of the vast stretch of Holkham beach and nature reserve, in north Norfolk, stands Holkham Hall. Built between 1734 and 1764 by Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester, the house remains in private hands and is the home of the Earl and Countess of Leicester.

Yet while the attention of the annual stream of visitors to Holkham is focused on the Hall’s breathtaking Palladian architecture, those who live and work on the estate know there are other fine Georgian buildings here to enjoy. Garden House, built for Holkham Hall’s head gardener in around 1785 and today the home of Timothy Leese, is surely one of the best.

Given its splendid setting ‘slap bang in the middle of 3000 acres (1200 ha)’ as Timothy succinctly puts it, here is a house that is best appreciated by approaching on foot. Walking towards it from the south on an early summer’s morning you will cross half parkland and half plough land, then finally across lawns unimpeded by bushes or trees.

The original house is perfectly symmetrical, with its garden door flanked by low-silled, wide sash windows. To the west, there is an extra wing, added in the 1880s, to house a new kitchen and additional bedrooms and bathrooms. Stand with your back to the house, and there isn’t a single habitation to be spotted in the low-lying Norfolk landscape.

‘The location is lonely or tranquil, depending on mood,’ says Timothy, ‘but that’s half the point of its setting.’

Skirt around the side of house, to the north side, and you discover the other key reason for its location. Here, surrounded by thick garden walls, lie the 2.5 ha (6 acres) of Holkham’s original kitchen garden, together with its many propagating glasshouses and assorted outbuildings. There’s also a fine, original orangery. In the late eighteenth century, this cluster was at the heart of catering on the estate. Today, the kitchen garden is the site for Holkham Gardens Nursery, set up in the 1960s, and now a well-stocked source for hardy ornamental nursery plants. It’s nicely fitting, then, that Timothy Leese – who has owned the nursery for the past seven years – strolls the five-minute walk to the gardens every day, just as the head gardener would once have done.

The house, appropriately called Garden House, was built by Samuel Wyatt (1737–1807), a popular architect and engineer at the time, famously associated with two large houses across the other side of the country: Tatton Park in Cheshire and Shugborough in Staffordshire.

He worked on a number of projects at Holkham Hall between 1780 and 1807, and his first commission there was to design and construct the orangery, the kitchen gardens and the head gardener’s house nearby. Timothy points out that this would not have been a house to be trifled with.

With around fifty staff beneath him, the head gardener was expected to live in some style, and warranted a home of good proportions. With its front and back staircases and entrances, laundry and cellar, servant’s bedroom and linen room, as well as spacious reception rooms, it was designed along the lines of a grand country house, but on a much smaller scale.

Garden House certainly has a pleasing exterior, constructed from the same honey coloured bricks as the main house – not surprising, given that the Hall had its own brickworks. The roof is slate, and Tim recalls hearing that Samuel Wyatt – whose godson was the land agent for Lord Penrhyn (from whose land the slate was mined) – was a keen fan of the material, so he was clearly looking after kith and kin.

As for the orientation of the building, Tim points out that it’s an intriguing five degrees off due north on the compass point. ‘It’s thought that a bothy, to house some of the gardeners, was already on the site, so rather than knock it down, the house was built a little off-centre,’ he says.

What is particularly interesting is that, given its two main entrances, front and back, it’s hard to discern which one was originally the more important. The north door is closer to the kitchen garden, and once had a driveway directly in front. (Tim has now rerouted this, as nursery customers tended to wander down it, then press their faces to his windows.) However, from the garden entrance the hall leads into the principal reception rooms – the drawing room is to the right, the dining room to the left. There is no evidence, Tim says, that a driveway ever swept around to this side of the house. The layout, then, is a triumph. ‘There are no cars on a drive to impede my views of the countryside,’ says Tim. And there would never have been any carriages, either.

Take a tour around the house as it is today, and the layout within is as regular and well planned as its perfect exterior. Given its Grade II listing, major alterations would have been out of the question, but Timothy found little that he needed to change. Enter through the garden door, past the staircase and principal rooms, and to the right there is a study and downstairs cloakroom, and to the left, the ‘book room’, which leads directly into the kitchen.

In order to maximize light from an east-facing window in the study, Timothy’s architect, Robert Chance, aligned all the doors, so it’s possible to stand in the kitchen and see straight through to the garden. A similar alignment took place upstairs, and a wall was removed on the landing. Now sunlight floods in from the sash window directly above the garden door.

It is the windows, Tim says, that are the best feature of the house. They are wide, and low, though never out of proportion, and because all the principal rooms face south, you pass from one sunny room to the next. Even the garden entrance has a fanlight (featuring the Prince of Wales feathered crest) and glazed side panels.

Yet look at a floor plan and good circulation is also key. The kitchen alone has five doors; all, on inspection, are necessary. One leads to the dining room, one to the lobby (and back door), one to the larder, one to the laundry, and the last is the entrance point from the book room. It may have been built in the 1880s, but here is an immaculately planned kitchen; situated to one side of the main building, but nevertheless functioning at its heart.

Upstairs, the layout has evolved considerably since the nineteenth-century extension. When the house was originally built, it would have had two principal bedrooms, immediately above the dining room and drawing room, facing south, and two further bedrooms on the north side.

With the late nineteenth century addition (which has a staircase leading from the kitchen to an upstairs lobby and linen cupboard) the owners would have embraced the fashion for plumbed bathrooms. Today, there are four bedrooms and three bathrooms – and the original linen cupboard still survives.

As for the architecture within, it is satisfyingly intact, although when Timothy first took possession some of the ceilings and floorboards had rotted and had to be replaced. In keeping with many modest Georgian houses, the style is not elaborate: wainscotting and dado rails are scaled down, and there are no cornices in the bedrooms.

But Timothy points out that Samuel Wyatt was a geometric designer, with a tendency to plain detailing. Yet it is a simplicity imbued with elegance, evident in the sweep of the wooden stair-rail, the arched fireplace alcoves in both drawing room and dining room, and the gentle arch of the glazed garden door.

Happily, Timothy has resisted the temptation to fill all alcoves with shelves and cupboards: those in the drawing room still hold freestanding furniture, as they would most certainly always have done. In the dining room, he blocked up a doorway which had been inserted into the right-hand alcove, and simply added display shelving and cupboards below.

In the book room, architect Robert Chance was responsible for lining the walls with bookshelves, to house Timothy’s huge personal collection, and for inserting a concealed door. While the fireplaces are original, downstairs Timothy replaced inappropriate ‘new’ slips, inserted by the previous owner, with plain stone ones copied from upstairs. He also reinstated the open hearths, and fires frequently blaze in every room.

It is pleasing to see that, rather than over-clutter the rooms with furniture and paintings, Timothy has decorated with a light touch, so that attention is thrown back to the views beyond the windows.

Walls throughout are in pale or dark tones of a neutral grey-green (according to whether the room faces north or south), flooring is coir matting (except for terracotta tiles in the hall) and upholstery neutral. ‘The rooms are not really very big, so the spaces seem more restful if they are all much the same shade,’ comments Timothy.

The subdued lichen colour, he explains, is a complimentary tone that shows off both people and flowers to their best advantage. One hopes that the head gardener, roses in hand, would have sincerely approved.

The English House, by Sally Griffths and Simon McBride, is published by Scriptum Editions, and is priced at £24.95