Grove House Including Moorish Room

Grove House is a substantial dwelling house in Hampton, constructed in the later 17th century and known as the Brick House in 1669. The building was enlarged during the mid-18th century and underwent remodelling in both the early to mid-19th century and the early to mid-20th century. The most remarkable addition, the Moorish Room, was built between 1892 and 1896, based on drawings of the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain, by the architect and antiquarian Owen Jones (1809-1874).

Construction and Materials

The front range dating from the 18th century is built of red-brown brick with red brick dressings. It features rendered quoins, a plinth, plat band, parapet, porch and gable walls, all topped with a pitched slate roof. The rear range from the 17th century is constructed in red brick with red brick dressings and similar rendered details, covered by a hipped slate roof. The Moorish Room itself is built of stock brick with flush red brick and stone dressings, and its distinctive dome is clad in lead.

Layout and Form

The house follows a double-pile plan, meaning it consists of two parallel ranges, both of two storeys above a basement. To the north of these main ranges stands a shallower three-storey range. Attached to the north-east corner is the single-storey Moorish Room (also known as the music room), which leads to a small conservatory and the footings of what was once a polygonal conservatory or glasshouse.

The Main House Exterior

The principal façade presents a symmetrical five-bay elevation with six-over-six-pane sash windows, mostly dating from the later 19th century, set beneath scalloped canopies. The upper floor window sills rest on a slender rendered plat band. Windows lighting the staircase have been replaced with fixed rectangular leaded lights within integral round-arched heads, though they occupy the original openings. The ground floor sash at the base of the stair, now partly blocked, may date from the early 19th century. The south gable wall contains inserted windows with leaded rectangular panes and overlights. A rendered moulded cornice and blocking course features a shallow central pediment. The mid-19th century porch has a flat roof with pilasters at the corners, round-headed side openings, and a pair of eagles perched on top. The front door is panelled and partly glazed and, though it appears to be from the 20th century, hangs on robust HL and H hinges.

The shallower three-storey, two-bay range has a plain brick parapet and six-over-six-pane sashes in exposed boxes on the upper floors, some of which may retain early glazing bars. On the ground floor, a door has been inserted into one window opening while the other has been enlarged. A small circular window (oculus) has been inserted on the first floor. Brick chimney stacks stand on the north gable wall of each front range and centrally on the ridge.

The rear elevation, also of two storeys and five bays, displays quoins and a parapet similar to the entrance front. The windows are tall and narrow, reminiscent of late 17th or early 18th century forms. On the ground floor they have flat-arched gauged red brick architraves. The upper floor features six-over-six-pane sashes with very slightly cambered heads. Ground floor windows have full-height casements beneath rectangular overlights, all with rectangular leaded lights, and open onto a central splayed flight of stone steps and a shallow balcony extending across the full width of the façade. This balcony is formed of concrete slabs supported on pierced cast iron brackets and projects over the basement area. The railings have been replaced.

Attached to the Moorish Room is a simple rectangular gabled timber conservatory leading to a polygonal paved area with a rendered parapet wall. This parapet is thought to have once supported a glazed superstructure, possibly with a central opening, beneath which lies a circular pond with a stone rim. These features are all loosely based on the Court of Lions at the Alhambra.

The Moorish Room Exterior

The northern elevation of the Moorish Room features triple horseshoe-headed windows. Similar openings flank the conservatory on the garden front. The roof has ribbed segments supporting an almost spherical cupola, each segment of which contains a circular glazed opening. The cupola is crowned by a finial surmounted by a crescent moon.

Interior of the Main House

The entrance hall is a single space with stairs set against the southern gable wall, opposite a pair of round-arched alcoves and a doorway which flank a small moulded stone fireplace. The modillion cornice appears at least in part to be from the 18th century and is said to resemble others in the neighbourhood. The walls are panelled with a rinceau moulded dado. Doors are of six moulded panels set in deep panelled linings with moulded architraves. Windows also have panelled linings.

The oak stairs probably date from the early to mid-20th century, when the hall appears to have been remodelled, and are thought to be based on the 18th century staircase. The stair features columnar Corinthian newel posts and twisted balusters, three per tread, with moulded tread ends and a ramped, moulded handrail. This form is echoed in the dado, which has raised and fielded panels.

The former drawing room contains a late 19th or early 20th century moulded stone fireplace with herringbone brick linings. The adjacent room has mid-20th century three-quarter height panelling with an integral fireplace. Upper floor rooms have plain six-panelled doors; one fireplace has a moulded surround and overmantel. Small sections of moulded cornices and ceiling mouldings remain, most visible in the corridors. The back stairs have turned newel posts and stick balusters. The basement contains brick-vaulted cellars and stone flag floors, some reset at a lower level.

Interior of the Moorish Room

The Moorish Room is laid out as a central rectangle beneath the dome, with shallow lateral bays under horseshoe-shaped arches supported on slender timber shafts enriched with plaster mouldings. The decoration throughout is extraordinarily rich. Thin pre-cast plaster wall panels and dado panels, simulated to look like tiles, are attached to wooden slats fixed to the walls. Where tiles are used, they may be imported from Spain. The apparently carved interlacing beneath the dome is actually of embossed paper, though the pierced fretwork panels above and surrounding the door and window openings are of timber.

External and internal windows in gilded frames have shaped heads, some cusped, with leaded coloured glass either in geometric patterns or with slender leaded rectangular clear glass lights. Some internal doors and windows have open timber fretwork panels. Panelled doors, set in enriched gilded frames and with glazed panels under cusped arched heads, lead to the conservatory.

Polished stone steps lead up to a gallery at entrance level with a pierced balustrade of small rectangular fretwork panels containing inset panels resembling cypress trees or seeds. The floors are of polished stone inlaid with dark marble spokes radiating from a central octagon.

The room retains most of its original polychromy in rich reds, blues and greens, with gilded timber shafts, very closely copying Owen Jones's drawings of his interpretation of the Alhambra. The room was heated, with cast iron vents echoing the design of the dado panels set into the lower walls.

Historical Background

Local tradition associates the building of the Moorish Room or music room at Grove House with J.C. Stutfield, a retired army officer who leased the house from 1892 until his death in 1925. According to this tradition, Stutfield, having converted to Islam while in the East, built the Moorish Room as a mosque. More accurately, it appears that Stutfield, who joined the army in 1873, was based in Gibraltar in 1880, from where it is possible he visited the Alhambra in Granada in southern Spain. Equally, the Moorish Room may have been inspired by his brother H.E.M. Stutfield (died 1929), who travelled to Morocco and published various works on mysticism and religion.

The Alhambra, set above the Spanish city of Granada, is one of very few medieval Islamic palaces to survive in the world. Built in the 13th century and largely decorated in the 14th century, it fell to the Catholic forces of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, after which it became a royal residence. Between the end of the 16th century and the later 18th century it was neglected, until it was rediscovered by travellers on the Grand Tour.

In the 1830s, Owen Jones (1809-1874) and Jules Goury (1803-1834), as young architectural students, spent many months recording the site. Their studies were published between 1836 and 1845 as "Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra."

The Moorish Room at Grove House is a very rare surviving example of Jones's interpretation of polychromy at the Alhambra, theories which influenced the 19th century restoration of the historic site. But for the fact that Jones had died in 1873, the room could be ascribed to him. His influential ideas and designs were made available to the public by example through the Alhambra Court at the Crystal Palace, built when it moved to Sydenham in 1854, but gained particular prominence through the publication of "Plans, Elevations, and Sections and Details of the Alhambra," which was effectively used as a pattern book.

This room is an example of how advancing knowledge affected taste, introduced first through the Grand Tour to elite circles, but also how it became commonly available through the increased availability of accurately reproduced information. In this case, this was through Jones's pioneering use of chromolithography, which he developed to reproduce coloured plates for the books. The extraordinary, untouched survival of the room at Grove House also demonstrates the technical process, showing that the interior was pre-cast and assembled on site. Pattern book designs could therefore be mass-produced to supply a large and demanding market for off-the-peg interiors. There is at present little indication of this industry other than in the survival of untouched interiors such as this.

In the public realm, this interest in Moorish taste spawned theatres and baths such as the Turkish baths at Victoria Baths, Manchester of 1866, and at Bishopsgate in the City of London, built in 1894-1895. In the domestic house, and very much in the male domain, it inspired smoking, music and billiard rooms, such as the Moorish smoking rooms at Rhinefield Hall in Hampshire, built by Romaine Walker in 1888-1890, and the smoking room at Breadsall Priory in Derbyshire in 1861. This widespread taste for Moorish fashion in the home began to decline by the end of the 19th century, after which much of it was replaced.

Owen Jones's interest in polychromy, of which Islamic art was a part, is seen across the spectrum from the interior of churches such as St Bartholomew, Sutton Waldron in Dorset, built in 1847, to commercial buildings such as St Paul's House in Leeds of 1878 and the former bazaar and winter gardens in Bristol of 1878, and in domestic buildings such as Woodhouse Hall in Leeds of 1847, decorated using his designs. Although Jones had died in 1874, his drawings provided the model for the Moorish music room at Grove House in the 1890s. The room was associated with a conservatory in the centre of which is a circular pond and a narrow canal leading from it, reminiscent of the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra, all of which may have combined to create a setting for exotic plants, fragrances and possibly birds.