Missenden Abbey

Missenden Abbey is a former country house incorporating fabric from an Augustinian abbey, now in use as a management and adult education centre. The abbey was founded around 1133 by William de Missenden. Following the Dissolution, it was leased as a country house in 1541. The building underwent various phases of modification during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Around 1806 it was remodelled and enlarged in Regency Gothic style for John Ayton by an architect unknown. Following a fire in 1985 which gutted the interior, the building was remodelled with several rooms reconstructed by County Architect Paul Markcrow between 1985 and 1988.

Medieval fabric remains incorporated in the south and east walls and within the interior. Externally, the building is entirely of early 19th-century date. The exterior was restored following the fire with render channelled to appear as ashlar, behind slate roofs with castellated parapets having a string course at the base. The building has a rectangular plan with northern projections, two storeys with a first-floor string course, and an asymmetrical western entrance front containing six windows. A castellated porte-cochere sits to the left of centre with its doorway converted to a window. A post-1985 entrance to the right has a glazed porch.

Windows are predominantly Gothic or Tudor arched heads with hood-moulds, Y-tracery, transoms and mullions. Buttresses articulate the bays and terminate in pinnacles above the parapet. The right-hand angle features an octagonal tower with arrow-slit windows and a domed roof surmounted by a cross. The symmetrical south garden front has three central buttressed bays with traceried Tudor arched windows, a three-light oriel to the first-floor central bay, and a parapet rising to form a pediment. Ground-floor outer bays have traceried canted bay windows forming castellated balconies to the first-floor windows. The north and east fronts are in similar but less elaborate style.

The interior has been completely remodelled since 1985, incorporating surviving fabric from previous builds and reconstructing some of the Regency Gothic plasterwork in the garden room and dining room. The garden room, dining room and lounge contain good contemporary stained glass by David Pearl. Surviving medieval stained glass roundels, imported for the Gothic rebuild, are incorporated in the former western entrance.

Missenden Abbey was the first abbey founded in Buckinghamshire and the first or second Arrouaisian house in England. It was dissolved in 1583. Before the 1985 fire, the east range attic retained five arch-braced trusses with two tiers of curved wind braces, a rare survival from the 15th or early 16th century from the monks' dormitory. The south (frater?) range had one similar truss at the east end. All have been destroyed.