This house is built on a fine estate near Cirencester. The previous house built in the 1960’s was considered cramped and inadequate for the family’s needs, as both a home and a space for grand entertaining. Despite some severe planning restrictions on the size and height of the house, we were nevertheless able to achieve a very elegant result, and the house won the Georgian Group’s Best New Building in the Classical Spirit Award.
The house has a square plan to the main block with an elegant suite of reception rooms located around the core of a gracious, top lit central hall. The house is very much in the Cotswold William and Mary and Queen Anne idiom. It has a tall sprocketed roof with walls of both locally quarried stone to the walls, and finely mounted ashlar work to the window surrounds and door openings. The serenity of the composition is very much the result of much attention to proportion and our understanding of perfect window to wall proportions.
The building is highly and correctly detailed, with a glorious swan necked pedimented door case bearing the family’s coat of arms on the entrance elevation. All the elevations are slightly different, and we have implied the idea of a later historical transformations in some of the architectural forms and decoration, which are in early regency style. This is shown particularly in the kitchen wing, with its Neoclassical proportions, elegant anthemion, and guilloche decoration, and on the garden side with its decorated Tuscan columns and frieze surmounted with sculptural stone acroteria.
The house has become a much admired and loved home and is now the correctly scaled centrepiece of a thriving estate.
Inside, the house is richly detailed. The main fireplaces were designed uniquely by us for the house and complimented by the ornate plasterwork, including very special columns and capitals to the drawing room, which also contains a magnificent statuary marble fireplace. The staircase has finely turned balusters, Corinthian newel posts and ornately carved ends, as well as a grand roof lantern. All the bedrooms on the upper floors have beautiful views over the parkland and beyond.
Yiangou have overseen all aspects of the project to create an idyllic and supremely comfortable lodge style property which is more than twice its 19th century size.
Ross has been a practising Architect for nearly thirty years, designing many buildings – including several RIBA and Georgian Group award-winning projects.
Yiangou Architects specialise in designing new country houses. Our knowledge and experience can help clients from first sketches, through planning process, to completion.
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