Cowdray Park

Cowdray Park is a large Victorian country house built in an eclectic combination of Tudor revival, baronial and vernacular revival styles. Constructed in ashlar stone, brick, tile hanging and pargetting, it comprises at least three main building phases with subsequent campaigns of alteration and improvement. The design deliberately creates the impression of a building with ancient origins that has grown gradually over centuries, though this appearance is largely a Victorian creation.

The house is arranged around a double-height Buck Hall at its centre. The east range contains the main entrance hall with a billiard room to its south and the main stair tower to its north. The south range accommodates a study in the south-east corner, followed by a drawing room and sitting room in the south-west corner. The west range houses the dining room. The north range contains service rooms including a utility room, larder and commercial kitchen, along with a family room and an open-well service stair to the north-east. A north-west service wing contains a spiral service stair at the north-west corner of the main house, pantry and flats beyond. A large children's room occupies the former kitchen, with a play room and music room positioned to the north of the courtyard. The north-east service wing contains a boot room, offices and flats beyond.

Exterior

The exterior presents three distinct yet equally impressive elevations: the east entrance front, the south garden façade featuring the Buck Hall, and the west garden elevation overlooking the designed landscape. The composition is dominated by a massive stone stair tower around which the lower ranges cluster. This tower is undoubtedly a reference to the ruined Cowdray House, which is similarly dominated by its crenelated tower, providing an architectural link between the family's former and present home. The two buildings are intervisible across the designed landscape. Similar historical references appear in the exaggerated Tudor-style red brick chimneys and Tudor arches to doorways.

The main house exhibits fantastical vernacular styling with half-timbered, jettied and tile-hung gables, mullion and transom windows with leaded lights, turrets, deep eaves with decorative barge boards and timber brackets, and some pargetting. Armorial touches include the griffin (the Cowdray badge) and a coat of arms above a doorway on the east entrance front. Lead rainwater hoppers are decorated with coronets and foliage.

The south garden front combines vernacular and baronial styling. The impressive stone-built double-height Buck Hall, expressed most clearly on this elevation with its steeply-pitched roof topped with bestial sculptures and dominant south traceried window, nestles between two tile-hung gabled ranges which are distinct in their detailing. This reinforces the impression of a house of considerable antiquity.

Service and ancillary ranges form a courtyard to the north of the main house, including a stone north-east range now used as offices. In its styling this gives the impression of an earlier country manor house. While its northernmost extension dates from the early 20th century, the bays immediately north of the main house are remnants of the service wing of the former Keeper's Lodge. Its rear courtyard-facing wall has well-crafted flat stone arches above unhorned sash windows of late 18th-century date.

The house is deliberately irregular in its massing, roofscape and fenestration—no two bays are identical—yet from this apparent incoherence emerges a convincing whole. Materials are carefully and effectively employed, from the finely jointed ashlar of the entrance front to the scalloped detailing of the window surrounds in the servants' court.

Interior

The interior of the main house is arranged around the central double-height Buck Hall. The main entrance in the east elevation opens into a generous entrance hall with lime-finished original woodwork and coloured glass using the 'E' for Egmont and coronet as decorative devices. This opens through a glazed screen into a wide north-south corridor with finely crafted sandstone arches with chamfered reveals.

To the north-east lies the impressive baronial-style stone staircase tower containing a magnificent timber open-well staircase with carved and moulded newels and pendants and pierced panels of high quality. The tower is decorated with armorial detailing including delicately carved stone shields and initials, as well as further coloured glass decoration to its mullioned stone windows.

South of the entrance hall is the present billiard room, with a study at the south-east corner. While the billiard room appears authentic with its panelling and marble fireplace, it was created by the present Lord Cowdray in 1995, although re-using components from the earlier billiard room located at the south-west corner of the house. The study was remodelled in a classical style at the same date.

South of Buck Hall is the classical drawing room (also remodelled in the 20th century, although possibly as part of the 1927 campaign) and morning room, which is split-level. The lower south-western part was the former billiard room and has linenfold panelling and an elaborate plaster ceiling decorated with roses and thistles.

West of Buck Hall is the large dining room with panelled walls and a drop tray ceiling decorated with floral swags and panoply.

The centrepiece both literally and architecturally is the double-height Buck Hall, a tour de force of the medieval baronial style. This is stone built, of five bays, with a majestic hammer-beam roof supported on stone corbels. The north wall is dominated by the stone fireplace inserted by the first Viscount in 1909, which includes Pearson's heraldry and the family motto 'Do it with thy might' carved in relief. Above the fireplace at first floor level is a minstrel's gallery, understood to be of 1909 also, replacing the Victorian incarnation. There are also six balconies along the west and east walls overlooking the hall, all with the same moulded stone arches and curving carved balustrades. The south wall is dominated by a large four-light traceried window.

To the north-west and north of Buck Hall is a serving area with original cupboards, pantry, back staircases to the north-east and north-west (the former a spiral staircase, the latter with splat balusters), utility room, modern commercial kitchen, staff room (the former boot room with enunciators and a range of original cupboards) and family room. The kitchen was formerly located to the north of the servants' court but is now a children's play room, although it retains its large stone fireplaces. The northern ranges, originally also servants' quarters, are now largely converted into staff flats.

The master suite is on the second floor in the east range with the nursery wing to its north. In the west range is the so-called Silver Room with its 17th-century carved and pegged panelling, intricately carved fireplace, surround and overmantle with caryatids, and carved four-poster bed, also with anthropomorphic detailing. The carpentry in this room is of very high quality in a resolutely Jacobean idiom. While it may be a possibility, although not proven, that this was brought from the Tudor Cowdray House and re-assembled here, an alternative is that it is representative of the late 19th-century and particularly early 20th-century trend for re-using salvaged material described in detail by Harris in his 2007 book 'Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvage'.

As expected, the rooms are more modest as one moves away from the main areas, with the second floor accommodation much simpler but still retaining some original features including carpentry. Flats within the service ranges and the cellar were not inspected. The cellar runs under the west and south side of the house and accommodates a wine cellar, gun room, bowling alley and other storage areas.