Who owns marshcourt hampshire

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Given that these are now twenty-first century gardens, they must also respond to available resources and contemporary management practices. Below we describe the conceptual framework of the planting design proposals, including installation and management practices, and will set forth a clear and cogent rationale for rehabilitation and a guide for future stewardship. Much has been written about the creative partnership that Lutyens and Jekyll shared over the course of twenty-five years, beginning when he was a year-old practitioner and she was a mature artist at Tankard, Judith B.

IX At Marshcourt, as a young architect, Lutyens employed principles drawn from classical, picturesque, and vernacular design traditions into an inventive combination of architecture and site design that would embody ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This aesthetic framework, which influenced all of the visual and performing arts, architecture, and landscape design over several decades at the turn of the twentieth century, served to bridge Victorian and Romantic traditions and twentieth century Modernism.

Her work revolutionized planting design in the late nineteenth century and continues to influence the character and expression of gardens today. Her legacy as a colorist with flowers is also well known and has several compelling roots in the development of the arts and sciences of the late nineteenth century. She studied the theories of color harmonies developed by the French chemist Chevreul in the mid-nineteenth century that likely shaped her creative production of tapestries and flower gardens.

Jekyll was also profoundly influenced by her close friend, the painter Hercules Brabazon, and the prescient work of JMW Turner. Their paintings dematerialized subjects into an atmosphere of subtle gradations of color—an approach she echoed in her own work.

Brown, Jane, Gardens of a Golden Afternoon. Van Nostrund Reinhold Company, , p. These records helped to illuminate the relationships Lutyens intended between the site he found and the site he designed. The house itself is a great white building overlooking the Test River Valley. Constructed predominantly of chalk and flecked with flint and brick tile inlay, it is the most obvious nod to the local geology. Brown, Jane. Gardens of a Golden Afternoon. To respond to the steep conditions Lutyens utilized a rectilinear system of masonry walls and earthen embankments of impressive scale that extend orthogonally from the house, to terrace the site and structure the sequence of garden rooms that wrap the house.

Where masonry walls and balustrades end, a precisely regulated series of yew hedges complete the geometric figure of the garden rooms. Based on historic photographs and site structures that remain, these features—stepped masonry walls and balustrades, earthen embankments and formal hedges—are the primary ordering elements of the designed landscape and those through which Lutyens united the house and its site. The deterioration of the original fabric began in when the estate transitioned to the wartime use of housing evacuated children.

In , it then became the home of the Marshcourt Preparatory School. During the more than fifty years that the school owned the estate, garden rooms were adapted into sites for modular structures, the drive geometry was altered to accommodate larger vehicles, some masonry components in the gardens were removed, perennial beds were not regularly maintained and yew hedges were cut down or replanted without adherence to the original location, height or width that Lutyens had carefully calibrated to relate to the garden architecture.

The property returned to private ownership in and was owned by 2 different families before the current owners acquired it in During this period of previous ownership, the site design underwent an additional process of degradation through the removal of the original chalk embankments along the drive between the lodges and the house and along the back drive and tennis lawn to allow for greater ease of mowing.

The re-grading of the embankments into gentle, rolling slopes required significant clearing within the ancient copse, which further diminished the integrity of this unique, character-defining feature of the original designed landscape and negatively impacted many of the year-old oaks. In the gardens themselves, although much of the masonry structure survived, little of the original planting remained.

Within the walls and hedges that define the garden rooms at Marshcourt two primary characters are revealed: the first, expanses of open restrained fine lawn and the second, an effusion of perennials in beds set within detailed masonry. Only cursory documentation exists as notations in her hand on a few surviving Lutyens drawings.

Planting plans in her handwriting do exist for proposed renovations; however, the areas of the property these describe are remote from the house and it is unclear how many of these proposals, if any, were realized. We can assume that virtually nothing from the original planting of the gardens remains. The large figs located in and above the sunken garden, and the roses and grape vines that adorn the pergolas, may be the only original plants remaining.

In addition to the lack of primary source planting records and extant site evidence, it is clear from surviving correspondence and photographs that several hands had been at work in the gardens from their inception.

Johnson would much rather that you [Jekyll] do the planting. The original planting design of the garden rooms is most clearly documented in historic photographs — specifically those from Country Life and that include images of the Long Walk, Sunken Garden and Sundial Lawn.

The photographs of the Sundial Lawn depict significant change in the garden over the early decades. Each of its manifestations lack cohesion and appear almost authorless.

Here Jekyll may not have been involved in the design or her plans may not have been adhered to by the gardeners. The Long Walk includes beds overflowing with peonies and roses bordered by a Jekyll staple, bergenia. And images of the Sunken Garden indicate several of her favorite plants including roses, ladies mantle, artemesia and santolina. These photographs also evidence her way of grouping plants to create robust, impressionistic effects tailored to each garden.

Plants are composed in masses scaled to relate to the size of the garden space, the imposing architectural enclosure, and the sweeping views of the distant landscape. Because the images of the flower gardens are suggestive but not definitive about their original intent we set out to formulate a clear and cogent argument for change.

We have therefore determined that rehabilitation is the only appropriate treatment for the flower gardens. Since , when Country Life was founded, the magazine has championed the cause of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and his alter ego Gertrude Jekyll, and woe betide any owner of a Lutyens house who dared to alter it in a manner deemed inappropriate. Previously, clunch had been used inside churches and for cottages, but never as the building material for a 27,sq ft country house, where the whiteness of the walls is enhanced by the contrast with the tall, red brick chimneys and long, unbroken sweeps of pitched tile roof.

The house was completed in , but Lutyens came back several times over the years to make alterations and improvements installing more bathrooms and adding, in ? Mr Robinson apparently spent little time at Marshcourt, and, eight years ago, he sold it to the present owners, who have worked wonders, not only with the grand Edwardian rooms the spectacular drawing room, dining room, library and ballroom but upstairs as well.