Sandhurst, Gloucestershire

Warm and cool, rough and smooth

There’s something very satisfying about the warm colour of Georgian brickwork bathed in sunlight, and if the bricks have been used to build a country house of delightful proportions, so much the better – even if, as is the case at beautiful Wallsworth Hall, those proportions have been somewhat skewed by the addition of an off-centre turret and a protruding bay (in harder, later brick) on the left-hand side. But houses grow and their owners have changing ideas about what they want, and I’m happy to accept these changes as interesting bits of history, revealing developing needs and new tastes. They don’t, for me, wholly destroy the beauty of the mid-18th century original, in which old brickwork is complemented by sash windows, stone dressings, and a rather pleasing row of three circular windows to the central attic.

More recent changes have had a less obvious effect on the exterior of the house. It has been for some decades the home of Nature in Art, the first museum and art gallery dedicated to art inspired by nature. It celebrates such art (both fine and applied) through a growing permanent collection, a programme of special exhibitions covering everything from botanical illustration to wildlife photography, an artists in residence scheme, and a range of courses.

Architecturally, what particularly caught my eye, as I approached the house, was the doorway. Here too, the sun played its role, bringing out the details of the bold pediment, with its chunky dentils creating a pattern of light and shade. It’s this detail, and the extraordinary columns that are striking. Just as the sloping sides of the pediment are broken by chunks of carved stone, so the columns are raised to a greater level of decorative splendour by three cubic stone blocks, again chunkily carved, which punctuate their Roman Doric smoothness.

What these bits of carving do is take us from the rational, 18th-century mode of classical symmetry to a the world of caves and grottoes. Look at one of the square sections of the blocked column closely and you see a cluster of rock-like lumps and facets, many of which have the chisel marks clearly visible to emphasize their roughness, interspersed with what look like icicles or stalactites. It’s the sort of thing that would be at home in a grotto in the garden of a great house like Stourhead, and translates us from the balmy sunshine to the shivering sound of the aria sung by the Cold Genius in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. What a place to end up on a warm winter’s morning: delightfully different, but still contained within the classical proportions of the house as a whole.