Secret Houses of the Cotswolds is a personal tour of twenty of the UK’s most beguiling houses
in this much loved area of western England.
Author and architectural historian, Jeremy Musson, and Cotswolds-based photographer Hugo Rittson Thomas, offer privileged access to twenty houses, from castles and manor houses, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mansions, revealing their history, architecture and interiors, in the company of their devoted owners.
In the footsteps of artists and designers including Humphry and George Repton, and Victorian visionary,
William Morris, who inspired the arts and crafts movement, and others such as Detmar Blow, Norman Jewson, Clough Williams-Ellis and Oliver Hill, we find a series of fascinating country houses of different sizes and atmospheres, which have shaped the English identity. Each house has their own story, but their distinctive honey-coloured stone walls, set amongst rolling hills, in different ways express the ideals of English life.
Most of the houses included here are privately owned and not usually open to the public. In this beautifully produced book, they can now be enjoyed through the eyes of their owners, as well as an experienced architectural historian, and an award-winning photographer.
A selection of the houses featured includes:
Asthall Manor is a rambling manor house where the famous Mitford sisters grew up, with a romantic garden designed by the Bannermans in 1998 and host to a bi-annual sculpture exhibition.
Broughton Castle is a medieval moated house, remodelled in the Tudor period, with gatehouse, great hall, and medieval chapel; it had been inherited by the Fiennes family in 1451, who live there still. Shakespeare in Love and Wolf Hall were both filmed here.
Burford Priory is a stately sixteenth-century house on the edge of the picturesque town of Burford; home of the Speaker of the Long Parliament, between 1949 and 2008 it was a monastery, but has now been expertly restored as a family home by Matthew Freud.
Chavenage is a picturesque sixteenth-century manor house near Tetbury with strong Civil War associations and home to the Lowsley-Williams family since the 1890s, who run it as a traditional estate; the house is familiar today as ‘Trenwith’ from the recent tv series of Poldark were filmed.
Duck End House is a miniature early seventeenth-century manor house restored by art expert Philip Mould (presenter of BBC1’s Fake or Fortune?) and his wife Catherine. It was previously owned by Penelope Lively the novelist who wrote many of her novels here.
Hilles House, the Arts and Crafts hilltop home near Painswick designed by the arts and crafts architect Detmar Blow for himself, still lived in by the Blow family, and made famous as a centre for designers and artists, by the current Detmar Blow and his late Issie Blow, fashion guru.
Sudeley Castle, once home to Queen Katherine Parr, the surviving wife of King Henry VIII, it had become ruinous before being restored by the Dent-Brocklehurst family in the nineteenth century. The current chatelaine Lady Ashcombe has carried out a major restoration. Sudeley is famously one of the inspirations for P.G.Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle.
