Barrow Hills

Barrow Hills is a country house, currently an Officers' Mess, situated on Long Cross Road. The original house was built in 1853 by W W Pocock, architect, for himself as a Gothic villa on a 100-acre estate. It was substantially enlarged and rebuilt between 1905 and 1912 by A E Taylor ARIBA, working with TW Heath & Son (Building & Decorator) and Robertsons Ltd (Builders), for J A Mullens, a partner in the London stockbroking firm of N Marshall & Co on Lombard Street. In 1928, the drawing room was remodelled and designed by Basil Ionides for Sir William Berry, later knighted as Lord Camrose of Long Cross, a newspaper proprietor and former Editor in Chief of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times who had purchased the property in 1920.

The house is constructed of yellow stock brick (handmade in the original section) with stone dressings. It features red tiled, gabled roofs with tall, brick, diagonally set, grouped chimney stacks and bargeboards in a Jacobethan style. The building is of two storeys with basement and attics, arranged with irregular fenestration of transom and mullion stone-frame casements, mostly retaining original glass and fittings. Each gable contains a window, predominantly of three lights.

The western main entrance front displays a tetrastyle portico with strapwork balustrades between the pedestals and forming a balcony above a cartouche-enriched entablature, approached by steps. This bay is flanked by canted bays with double-height bay windows having crenellated parapets. To the left is a courtyard entrance; the right-hand flanking bay features an oriel window at first-floor level and a traceried window on the ground floor.

The main garden front presents a symmetrical west end with projecting ground-floor bays with small pediments flanking a verandah with balustrade and double-curved steps to the terrace. The principal entrance has a mosaic floor depicting a beribboned laurel wreath encircling a bird's head. The next ground-floor bay to the right is an aviary lined with tufa forming stalagmites and stalactites. This is followed by two bays with bay windows, the left with crenellated parapet and the right with a timber-framed gable. The east facade displays a symmetrical design with a central projecting ground-floor chimney breast with single-pitch roof and a full-height narrower chimney with diaper work, terminating in three diagonally set stacks.

The interior is planned around two halls and a corridor. The entrance hall is a projecting bay set at an angle, oak-panelled in Jacobean style to two-thirds height with an exposed beam ceiling and enriched cornice. A large pilastered chimneypiece and pilastered doorcase with strapwork cresting are present. Curved stairs with strapwork balustrades lead through two-leaf panelled oak doors with copper furniture into a panelled passageway with ogee-panelled plasterwork, a barrel-vaulted ceiling decorated with Tudor roses. A screen opens into the panelled main stair hall, which contains a chimneypiece of brown marble topped by a band of brightly painted bas-relief medieval hunting scenes, with a beribboned laurel wreath on the breast above. The dogleg stair features Jacobean-style balusters. The passageway continues across the front of the house, with main rooms opening to the right.

The drawing room represents a particularly fine and important example of Basil Ionides's interior decoration, embodying his own interpretation of an early 18th-century scheme using detail from gesso furniture. The woodwork is cedar with gilded carvings. Ionic pilasters support a deep enriched ceiling cornice and form part of the doorcase with enriched pulvinated frieze and pediment; the door is panelled. A fireplace with dark green marble surround and carved and gilded mantelshelf is complemented on the opposite side of the room by a round-arched shelved niche with radiating feather motif gilding at the top and a carved and gilded Medusa head. Originally the pilasters were separated by plain taffeta panels and the fireplace bays panelled with soft grey-coloured glass; carved and gilded Medusa head electric light sconces originally adorned the walls.

The Jacobean-style former smoking room contains good oak fitted shelving and cupboards, with a patterned plasterwork ceiling with pendants. The dining room is in 18th-century style, featuring fine mahogany with fielded panel doors flanking and appearing as one with a panelled buffet having a circular over-mirror with carved seraphim flanked by enriched Ionic columns. A full-height mahogany panelled and ceiled inglenook has flanking Ionic columns and a chimneypiece with circular over-mirror carved with seraphim and festoons in the style of Grinling Gibbons, with green marble fire surround. A window from this inglenook looks into the rear of the aviary. The ceiling features moulded plasterwork panelling with a deep festoon-enriched frieze.

The former ballroom, in Jacobean style, is oak-panelled to two-thirds height and has a large carved and panelled oak inglenook fireplace with green marble fire surround; small windows flank the pilastered chimneypiece and the mantelshelf bears the date 1906 carved upon it. Ornamental plasterwork ceiling and frieze are present. The lower hall features Art Nouveau stained glass window panels and copper door furniture. Most first-floor rooms retain good fireplaces and features from different periods. Of particular note is the former boudoir with a large 18th-century style inglenook with windows to the left of the fireplace and a door to the right leading into a dressing room. The main bay window has a fitted painted timber seat and enriched plaster ceiling. A bathroom contains panels of Art Nouveau tiles in red, black, cream and buff colours.

Historically, the original Gothic villa design significantly influenced the plan of the 1905-1912 remodelling. Around 1912, J A Mullens brought a team of Japanese landscape gardeners to Barrow Hills to create a then-famous Japanese Garden; part of this survives in the form of highly realistic concrete "stone" rocks on a hillside with a pumped stream, pools, waterfall over a cliff to a pond and pergola.

Following Sir William Berry's purchase in 1920, ownership passed to the British Greyhound Association in 1937, who sold it in 1950 to St George's College, Weybridge. Realising that the Ministry of Supply was acquiring much of the surrounding land, the college sold Barrow Hills to the Ministry in 1952; the following year it became an Officers' Mess. Subsequently, a Test Track was constructed in the grounds, destroying much of the Japanese Garden.