Ripley Grange, outbuildings and glasshouses to the south-west and garden buildings

Ripley Grange is a country house in the Tudor style, built between 1928 and 1930 for Charles Frederick Clark, to the designs of Wallis Gilbert and Partners, with later alterations in the 1930s by K S Beken and E J Warne.

Construction and Setting

The house has a timber frame and brick construction with a roof covering of plain clay tiles. It stands in grounds of around 18 acres at the end of a long drive in an elevated position on the edge of Epping Forest. The plan is approximately rectangular, consisting of a principal range with crosswings at both ends, facing south-east towards the gardens. Adjoining the south-west gable is a smaller south range, probably built as the garage, with a large rear extension added in the early 21st century as a leisure complex.

Exterior

Ripley Grange is a spectacular house in the Tudor style with a timber frame of close studding and curved braces between sill and post, typical of the vernacular style prevalent in the eastern counties. The infill panels are rendered and the ground floor is of brick on a stone plinth. The house has two storeys plus an attic under a complex roofscape enlivened by a profusion of gables and tall chimney stacks of ornately moulded brick.

The central bay of the three-bay, south-east façade has a recessed ground floor and an overhanging gable resting on square timber piers, supported by moulded timber braces with drop finials. This provides shelter over the front door, which has vertical fillets within a Tudor arch surround. Above, the first floor is lit by a six-light mullion window with ornate Gothic tracery and diamond leaded lights, some bearing shields in stained glass chosen by Clark owing to their special significance to events and places in his early life. All the windows are in the same style. The gable is embellished with intricately carved bargeboards incorporating cusped quatrefoils, as are all the gables. It is flanked by three-light windows, and the attic above is lit by two dormer windows wholly within the roofspace, with the same mullion windows and bargeboards already described. On either side of the central bay are the taller gabled bays of the crosswings, which are lit by double-height canted bay windows. Decorative carved wooden panels are positioned below the first-floor windows. The attic is lit by four-light oriel windows in the gable heads.

The north-west elevation is very similar, with the same gabled bays at both ends and a centrally placed door in the same style in a Tudor arch surround with carved spandrels and a quatrefoil panel above. The central bay, which contains the great hall, consists of three gables, the middle one taller and slightly projecting. The entire ground and first floor consist of mullion windows filled with tracery and leaded lights with stained glass, giving the impression of a timber frame infilled with intricately detailed glazed panels.

The adjoining south-west range, presumably built as a garage, is timber framed in the same Tudor style. It has one and a half storeys under a hipped roof with a projecting central bay and wide timber doors, flanked by similar doors.

Interior

A series of photographs in Charles Frederick Clark: A Brief Biography of a Great Character (1945) shows the principal reception rooms and bedrooms in Ripley Grange, upon which this description is based. Apart from the changes to the service areas, the fabric of the interior is almost entirely original, including the stone fireplaces, the oak panelling, and the decorative ceiling mouldings.

The Library, also known as Clark's 'den', was the first room undertaken during the alterations of the 1930s. The walls are lined in linenfold panelling, based on some panelling in the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a carved frieze of a fluid and vigorous scroll design copied from Thame Park, near Oxford. The intricate plasterwork ceiling, copied in minute detail from the ceiling in Cardinal Wolsey's Closet at Hampton Court Palace, has a geometric pattern of small interlaced squares and elongated hexagons in shallow relief, infilled with circular motifs and pendants.

In the Morning Room, the lower half of the walls is lined in linenfold panelling copied from the Town Hall at Lavenham in Suffolk. The ceiling, copied from Queen Elizabeth's Sitting Room at Plas Mawr in Conway, has a fluid design of large concave diamonds and ovals in slender moulded ribs, forming panels embellished with motifs including Tudor roses and fleur-de-lys. One end of the room is entirely taken up by a highly architectural chimneypiece with a Tudor arched stone surround and overmantel of decorative panels incorporating the initials 'E' and 'R', flanked by terms in relief.

The joinery in the long Front Hall is based on the panelling, piers and arches from Penshurst Place in Kent. It has exposed timber-framing and moulded ceiling beams forming square panels. The end wall has full-height panelling in two stages with pointed ogee trefoils and a wide depressed arch opening to the staircase with carved spandrels and flanking pilasters of slender round section. The open well staircase has a dogleg with a landing at the turn and a panelled soffit. A substantial square newel, decorated in a strapwork design, is surmounted by a large, ornate finial.

The Great Hall at the back of the house is 20 feet high and is divided into bays by arched braces with decorative spandrels, supported by slender round columns. Along the upper half of the wall is a Gothic oak screen consisting of two-light Gothic windows with Y-tracery and cusped trefoils, divided by posts carrying ribbed vaulting, the whole copied from Warfield Church in Berkshire. The floor is stone-flagged, and deeply moulded beams divide the ceiling into square panels. A two-manual organ was built for the Hall with the swell organ pipes in a separate chamber above the ceiling, and the great organ pipes at one side of the Hall within a case of two stages, the upper stage with trefoil panels. The organs have since been removed but the organ loft is still there. At the other end of the Great Hall is a stone fireplace, copied from one in the Tower of London, with a depressed arch opening and large, tapering stone hood carried on moulded corbels. To the left is a Gothic niche from Harrow Church with a quatrefoil frieze and brattishing.

The Long Room, along the attic, has exposed close studding and a canted plaster ceiling of delicate raised ribs divided into round-edged rectangular panels in which large circles are placed with Tudor roses in their centre.

The principal bedroom is a reproduction of Christopher Wren's work, and hence is in a contrasting Classical style in which the panelling, door and cornice forms a coherent architectural scheme. The panelling has Classical proportions and the deep, elaborate wooden cornice is embellished with Classical enrichments including egg-and-dart and bead-and-reel. The corner doorway has a two-panelled door in a shouldered architrave flanked by fluted pilasters with Ionic capitals. Another bedroom is reproduced from an 18th-century room by William Gibb in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Subsidiary Features

The Ordnance Survey map shows, to the south-west of the house, a U-shaped building with a glasshouse between the two wings and a further two glasshouse ranges to the east. These are also shown on the OS map of 1939 and are thought to be contemporary with the house.

In Charles Frederick Clark: A Brief Biography of a Great Character (1945), photographs are included of an octagonal stone well in the rose garden which has Gothic carvings and a delicate metal overthrow in the form of a trefoil. Another photograph depicts one of the seven picturesque summerhouses erected by Clark in the 1930s. This has a circular plan and is constructed of timber with a conical thatched roof surmounted by a weathervane.

As a site visit was not undertaken, these structures are not marked on the accompanying map but they are included in the listing where they survive.