Sherborne Shell House In Walled Garden Of Harper House

Sherborne Shell House in Walled Garden of Harper House

A shell house in restrained classical style, created around 1750, standing within the walled garden of Harper House in Sherborne.

The building is constructed from coursed limestone rubble with a thatched roof. The floor comprises pale stone flags with black slate lozenges, probably dating from the early 19th century. The interior is decorated with a variety of shells and some glass.

The circular building measures approximately 5 metres in diameter and stands about 7 metres high. It contains a small chamber below the shell room, situated beneath the current ground level. Above this undercroft is a single octagonal room internally, accessed by a doorway which occupies one of its eight sides. The building is set into the outside of the wall surrounding the walled garden, with its entrance reached from the garden interior. The doorway stands under a plain timber lintel and contains half-glazed double doors dating from the 20th century but copied from an earlier design. Above the doorway the wall breaks upward slightly, incorporating a classical stone relief.

The restrained classical proportions of the octagonal shell room are complemented by delicately executed classical motifs in shells throughout. The ceiling is a segmented dome of eight panels separated by moulded ribs, with a central octagonal opening for a lantern. Each of the seven closed sides has a semi-circular headed alcove with a moulded limestone seat; above each niche is a decorative panel or shell roundel. A moulded plaster cornice with acanthus leaf motifs retains much original blue and green paint; above the acanthus leaves runs a border of stylised butterflies with shell, flower, oak leaf and fleur de lys motifs.

The entire inner surface is decorated with high-quality shell work. The alcoves contain geometric and floral designs picked out in larger shells against light shell backgrounds, some shells having painted decoration. Each ceiling panel features classically-inspired motifs constructed from tiny, closely-set shells against alternating gold and white backgrounds, with applied ribbons of lead painted green. The dome segments are separated by moulded ribs painted alternately gold and blue and wrapped with rows of whitish shells. Wall surfaces between shell panels are plastered with lime mortar mixed with crushed shell and glass to reflect light. Swags above the alcoves are formed from ribbons and leaves made from painted lead; trails of tiny flowers made from shells glued to cork and fixed to copper wire run around the ceiling panels, adorning swags, roundels and other applied plaster motifs. Plaster doves sit on Rococo supports in the spandrels beside one alcove, with an owl atop the niche; above another is a delicate flower basket. Despite the overall symmetry, no two panels are exactly alike. The shells are all native to the British Isles, with the overwhelming majority from the Dorset coast.

The circular building may originally have been a 17th-century dovecote, its characteristic shape and siting within outbuildings of a substantial period house supporting this hypothesis. Documentary sources begin in the later 18th century. Samuel Foot (1704-92) is mentioned in an 1801 advertisement as resident of a substantial house in Cheap Street with a large walled garden, hot-house and shell house. His will of 1784 records great losses through bad debts and disposal of large estate parts. The house and garden appear in the 1791 will of Thomas Gollop (1746-93), complete with shell house and outbuildings. After Gollop's death in 1793, the house was rented out before being sold by his son in 1812, with the shell house included.

Around 1820 the garden became detached from the Cheap Street house and was purchased by Samuel Whitty, married to the daughter of prominent local banker Simon Pretor, who lived adjacent to the Whittys in Long Street. Their houses stood directly south of the shell house garden, separated from it by land leased from the Digby family and divided by the wall still forming the southern boundary of the shell house garden. Whitty created a new access door in the wall. A map of 1834 shows his new garden layout with a path leading directly to the shell house, evidently intended as the focus of the pleasure grounds. By 1852 the adjacent plot had also been laid out as a pleasure garden with serpentine paths and planting; the house, now known as Harper House, had been rebuilt in the early 19th century by the new owner John Thorne (1786-1865), a Governor of Sherborne School from 1825.

In 1873, eight years after Thorne's death, his house became a boarding house for Sherborne School. As the school prospered, the housemaster Reverend Blanch was able to buy the walled garden and shell house. In 1910 the house was renamed Harper House. In 1931, the house was purchased, including the walled garden and shell house, from the housemaster by Sherborne School, in whose ownership it remains.