England's country houses have never been more popular with visitors. Most are packed with masterpieces of art and antiques, and they have vast landscaped gardens, often with lakes and fountains. They reflect all the splendour of England's glory years. Trevor Yorke, using original drawings, diagrams and photographs, takes the reader on a careful tour of the country house and describes its features, exterior and interior, upstairs and downstairs. He looks at the different periods of large country houses from the mid 1500s up to 1914, explaining the changing architectural styles. He describes the different rooms within the main house and their changing roles over the centuries. There is a glossary of architectural terms, and a quick reference time chart listing country house architects and the notable buildings they designed, with drawings of the period details that help to date them.

Based on the author's Slade lectures given at Oxford University in 1975-76.

The fascinating story of the evolution of the country house in Britain, from its Roman precursors to the present The Story of the Country House is an authoritative and vivid account of the British country house, exploring how they have evolved with the changing political and economic landscape. Clive Aslet reveals the captivating stories behind individual houses, their architects, and occupants, and paints a vivid picture of the wider context in which the country house in Britain flourished and subsequently fell into decline before enjoying a renaissance in the twenty-first century. The genesis, style, and purpose of architectural masterpieces such as Hardwick Hall, Hatfield House, and Chatsworth are explored, alongside the numerous country houses lost to war and economic decline. We also meet a cavalcade of characters, owners with all their dynastic obsessions and diverse sources of wealth, and architects such as Inigo Jones, Sir John Vanbrugh, Robert Adam, Sir John Soane and A.W.N. Pugin, who dazzled or in some cases outraged their contemporaries. The Story of the Country House takes a fresh look at this enduringly popular building type, exploring why it continues to hold such fascination for us today.

The English country house reached its apotheosis in the nineteenth century. Designed by the most eminent architects of the age, the houses were bigger, more elaborate and more lavishly furnished than ever before, becoming a byword throughout the world for luxury, technological innovation and convenience of plan. Michael Hall's new survey draws on the Country Life archive to present the most complete visual record yet published of the Victorian country house. Chronologically arranged to span the decades from the 1830s to the 1890s, the houses range from the High Gothic of Tyntesfield to Ferdinand Rothschild's flamboyantly French Waddesdon Manor and Philip Webb's Arts and Crafts interiors at Standen. Victorian houses have suffered more from sales and demolitions than houses from any other period. The Country Life images are the only record of great houses such as Wrest Park, Thoresby Hall and Hewell Grange in their heyday. Houses that have survived with their interiors intact but are little known to the public are also featured, such as Flintham Hall and the Earl of Harrowby's Sandon Hall. Here, too, are spectacular colour photographs of some of the most celebrated houses of the period, from A. W. N. Pugin's Scarisbrick Hall to J. D. Crace's astonishing interiors at Longleat. With over 150 superb photographs and a commentary by one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, this book provides an excellent overview of a major period in British architectural history. Michael Hall is an architectural historian and the Editor of Apollo magazine. A former Architectural Editor and Deputy Editor of Country Life, he is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a trustee of Emery Walker's Arts and Crafts house and Chairman of the Victorian Society's activities committee. His books include The English Country House: From the Archives of Country Life, also published by Aurum.

'A masterpiece of social history' Daily Mail There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. Real life in the country house during the 1920s and 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth and hidden behind stiff upper lips and film-star smiles. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters and diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world and shows how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs, and how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream.

English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy was one of the most acclaimed writers of his time, and his fan base has continued to expand in the years since his death as new generations of readers discover his work. The Country House touches on many same themes that Galsworthy's best-known works explore, including the tribulations facing a new class of landed gentry in nineteenth-century England.

The country houses of England are among her crowning glories. Presented here are ten outstanding examples, all still in the hands of descendants of the original owners. The houses range from Kentchurch Court, a fortified medieval manor house that has been the seat of the Scudamore family for nearly 1,000 years, to a delightful Strawberry Hill-style Gothic house in rural Cornwall, the ducal palace of Badminton in Gloucestershire, and Goodwood House, England's greatest sporting estate. Many of the houses remain closed to the public - and some have never been featured in a book before. James Peill recounts the ups and downs of such deeprooted dynasties as the Cracrofts, whose late 18th-century Hackthorn Hall is a perfect example of the kind of house Jane Austen describes in her novels (indeed, she appears on their family tree), as well as the Biddulphs, who constructed the Arts and Crafts masterpiece Rodmarton in the first decades of the last century. James Fennell provides superb photographs of a wealth of gardens, charming interiors, bygone sporting trophies, fine art collections and evocative family memorabilia. A stirring source of inspiration for all those concerned with living traditions and classic interiors, here is a proud celebration of England's country house heritage.

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces – the closet, the gallery, the library – and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews “A perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature.”—Molly Young, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) Eight friends, one country house, and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today) and “an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post) In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller Super Sad True Love Story.

A study of Britain's great nineteenth-century houses examines their architects, and the social, technological, and economic conditions that made the massive structures possible