Croome, Worcestershire

A glance into the past

Early on in the history of this blog, I did a couple of posts about Croome Court, the 18th-century house of the earls of Coventry. What especially interested me was the number and variety of buildings in Croome’s landscape garden and the surrounding countryside, from the classical ‘Temple Greenhouse’ by Robert Adam to a circular panorama tower. Croome is a place I’ve been meaning to revisit for a while now, and I planned to do a post about the house and its 18th-century architecture but, as usual, something unexpected caught my eye. So, much as I enjoyed looking at the Georgian architecture of the great house, designed by Capability Brown and with interiors partly by Robert Adam, here at the heart of this 18th-century building is, of all things, a bit of timber-framed wall.

The 6th Earl built Croome Court as we know it, an elegant Palladian house with corner towers and a central classical portico, in the 1750s. But the central part was actually a rebuilding of the family’s earlier 17th-century brick-built house – the architect, Brown, rebuilt it using the old foundations, facing it in stone, laying out new rooms inside, and adding the corner towers and portico. The 17th-century house, however, had an even earlier, timber-framed house at its core, and it’s a fragment of this that I noticed as I walked around the building’s basement. One of the National Trust’s helpful guides, seeing me looking at this, pointed out details on the floor that showed the lines of early, long-demolished walls among the floor tiles.

And so Croome Court, so classically perfect, turned out to be a bit of an architectural jigsaw, as so many buildings do when you look carefully. I don’t know if it was a member of the Coventry family or one of the house’s later owners* or the National Trust who now run and maintain the building who left this small section of timber-framing exposed. But I was pleased that they’d done so, because it made me think of the house in a different way, one more true to its complex history.

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* The ownership history of the house has been varied since the 1940s. Sold off by the family after World War II, it became successively home to a school, to the UK headquarters of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, to a property developer who planned to turn it into a hotel, and to another developer who lived in it for a while. The Croome Heritage Trust then took over the house in tandem with the National Trust, ensuring its survival.

Portland Place, London

Stucco unstuck

Back in the shiny 1980s, I remember standing in front of a London building site on which a new office block was going up. I was with an architect of my acquaintance, and the building was none of his doing. He contemplated the sheets of shiny cladding with which the building was being covered. ‘I call them fall-offs,’ he said. ‘Because they fall off.’ We bemoaned the terrible times, but we were both well aware that bits of buildings have been falling off for centuries. Take Liardet’s patent stucco, for example.

From the 17th century onwards, the type of plaster known as stucco was widely used to cover the outsides of buildings to create a finish that looked like the finest stone – at a fraction of the cost. As well as providing a smooth render for walls the material was also well suited for the production of moulded decorations – reliefs, swags, heads, and all the other motifs with which builders and architects, especially the classical architects of the 18th century, loved to adorn the facades of the best houses.

Robert Adam and his less famous brothers were among the most enthusiastic users of stucco. By the time the Adams were designing buildings several recipes of stucco had been developed, but the brothers favoured a specific one, an oil-based stucco devised by a Protestant clergyman from Lausanne called John Liardet. Liardet’s stucco, was an oil-based material – it contained boiled linseed oil instead of the water used in other mixes, and this was said to make the plaster more readily workable.


The Adams were enthusiastic about Liardet’s recipe, and acquired the exclusive right to use it – it seemed to be ideal to produce the delicate reliefs and other decorations that they liked so much. These details from a pair of houses in Portland Place show the kind of effect that the Adams created with Liardet’s stucco in the years after they made their business arrangement with him in the 1770s. The reliefs echo on this exterior wall the cameo-like panels showing classical figures, flowers, swags, and other designs that Robert Adam, especially, used to decorate his interiors.

The Portland Place decorations are rare survivors – and in fact are probably restorations rather than survivors in the strict sense. This is because soon after these houses were decorated with Liardet’s stucco in 1778, a problem emerged. The stuff turned out to have a far from tenacious attachment to the walls, and stucco was soon sliding off buildings and landing on pavements and in areas, At least one of the brothers’ clients, Lord Stanhope, pursued them for compensation, and the use of this kind of stucco was abandoned. By the end of the 18th century, more stable stuccos were available and one kind of fall-off, together with its hapless inventor, was consigned to the footnotes of architectural history.

Adam Street, London

Nowadays people think of Robert Adam as above all else a master interior designer – pastel shades, plaster cameos, and elegant fireplaces were his forte. But his many country house projects show that he could design on a grander scale and he wanted to do so in London. So in 1768 he and his architect brothers leased a site between the Thames and the Strand, planning one of the biggest mixed developments the capital had seen. The project, known as the Adelphi (from the Greek for ‘brothers’, adelphoi), was made up of rows of houses, set above cellars with river access that were to be let for the storage of wine and coal.

It was a grand scheme, designed to high specifications, and the houses were decorated by the best artists of the time. But it proved expensive to build and the houses were slow to find tenants. The brothers finally got permission to run a lottery to finance the completion. Sadly, the Adelphi didn’t last. Many of the houses were altered in the 19th century, and more still demolished in the 20th. Now only a few houses remain, together with the impressive headquarters of the Royal Society of Arts. For many passers-by, the street names (John Adam Street, James Street, William Street) are the only reminder of the brothers’ project. This is one of the best surviving Adelphi houses, its white strips of decoration marking it out as an Adam building. It maintains its neoclassical dignity, in spite of being dwarfed by the office block behind.