Antics Cono Sur
It’s one of the greatest flowerings of Greek Revival architecture in Europe. Yet it wasn’t purpose built: it’s a radical remodelling of an earlier building. This is the story of how a Restoration house in rural Hampshire became a cosmopolitan Greek temple (make that two Greek temples: minor and major) and after a few additions and subtractions evolved into a theatre and a theatrical backdrop for an opera festival.
“My father bought the estate in 1964,” recalls The Honourable Mark Baring on a private tour of the house (it’s not normally open to the public) accompanied by The Grange Festival’s Chief Operations Officer Michael Moody. “The Grange was out of Baring family ownership for 30 years. As a six year old I remember rooms with huge great pillars and bits of plaster in some disrepair. My father had a sale of contents which included the fireplaces. The stairs were sold and curiously they came back! My great grandfather had sold all the pictures.” In 1975 English Heritage took over the grey elephant that is The Grange. Mark has managed The Grange Estate, which his family own, since 2014.
He relates, “My father the 7th Baron Ashburton bought back the house and park for £157,000. That was for 660 acres and a crumbling house. Big houses were impossible to live in then under taxation rules. The house now gives so much to the feel of the opera!” Michael agrees: “It’s all about the setting in the landscape.” The inaugural opera festival was held on the estate in 1998. Four years later the orangery picture gallery (minor Greek temple) was opened as a theatre. Studio E were the architects for the conversion. The conservation architect was Dubliner John Redmill who smartly advised reinstating the Robert Smirke façade. “This reconnects the two temples,” John explains, “and acts as a screen to hide the modern building behind.”
When Mark’s ancestor Alexander Baring bought the estate in 1817 he commissioned Robert Smirke to add a single storey west wing and Charles Robert Cockerell to terminate the wing with a conservatory dining room (which would later become that orangery picture gallery). Robert was a pupil of George Dance the Younger and a leading light in the Greek Revival craze. His younger brother Sydney, also an architect, designed several Italianate villas stuccoed to the nines in Kensington Palace Gardens, London.
The main block of The Grange (major Greek temple) is the work of architect William Wilkins. In 1804 then owner Henry Drummond appointed the trailblazing Greek Revivalist to transform his Restoration house into an English Acropolis. The five bay fluted Doric portico (which swallows up the entire east elevation) is based on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens. Michael explains, “This drastic rebuilding resulted in some windowless rooms!” The introduction of a high entablature meant the servants’ quarters in the attic lost their dormers. Form doesn’t always follow function. Henry Drummond wasn’t impressed and sold up.
“‘Situated on a gentle declivity, and sloping towards a fine piece of living water, embosomed in wood and approached by magnificent avenues, it has the effect in the landscape of those ideal scenes which, indulged only in the painter’s imagination are hardly expected to be realised in nature.’ Thus The Grange was described in the Gardeners’ Magazine of 1826 after the architects William Wilkins and Charles Cockerell had made it the principal monument in Europe of neoclassicism and the supreme achievement of their profession at the time. As such it has been of importance ever since,” John comments with just a dash of hyperbole. Whether the servants would have agreed is a moot point.
“The 1664 house was designed by William Samwell, one of Charles II’s three Court architects, for Sir Robert Henley,” says Michael. “It was all about very clever maths. The double height entrance hall was like the hall in the Queen’s House, Greenwich. It was a 27 foot cube. The bedrooms on either side were 18 feet square. The corner closets were nine feet square.” A Running Times Master Sheet is pinned to the wall of the basement kitchen dressing room, the last room on the private tour: “Le Nozze di Figaro Run Times, Monday to Saturday, 17.30 Curtain Up Part One (one hour 37 minutes), 19.07 Curtain Down Part One, Interval (one hour 40 minutes) 20.47 Curtain Up Part Two (one hour 37 minutes), 10.24 Curtain Down Part Two.” The Irish Georgian Society Review 2024 carried an obituary to John Redmill. “He frequently indulged his love of opera,” wrote Mary Narvell, “with attendance at music festivals.”
