Barrington Court
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Barrington Court | |
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  Shown within Somerset
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| Building information | |
|---|---|
| Town | Barrington |
| Country | England |
| Coordinates | Coordinates: |
| Completion date | 1550s |
| Style | Tudor |
Barrington Court is a Tudor manor house begun c. 1538 and completed in the late 1550s, with a vernacular seventeenth-century stable court (1675), situated in Barrington, near Ilminster, Somerset, England. It was the first house acquired by the National Trust, in 1907, on the recommendation of the antiquarian Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley.[1]
Barrington Court, once dated 1514[2] and considered an early example of a symmetrical front, was completed in the late 1550s for William Clifton, a London merchant who had been assembling a Somerset estate.[3] Its central entry porch leads into a screens passage with the Hall on the left and, an innovation, a service passage leading to the kitchen wing that occupies the right wing. A symmetrically sited gatehouse (rebuilt) was set far forward of the house, to permit a full view of its symmetrical facade.[4]
The interior of the house suffered from its demotion to a tenant farm, and from a fire in the early nineteenth century; after being almost derelict it was repaired under the supervision of Alfred Hoare Powell. It is now a Grade I listed building.[5]
The entire interior of Barrington Court has been let as showrooms to the period interior design firm, Stuart Interiors, since 1986.[6]
[edit] Gardens
Barrington Court is noted for its Arts and crafts-style gardens for which garden designer Gertrude Jekyll provided planting plans,[7] which are being used to restore the gardens, laid out in 1917 by J. E. Forbes, of the partnership Forbes & Tate, for Lieut- Col. A. Arthur Lyle, in a series of walled rooms that include a white garden, a rose and iris garden and a lily garden. A kitchen garden occasionally provides produce for the National Trust property's restaurant located in the adjacent Strode House. The walled courtyard also has espaliered apple, pear and plum trees.
 Jekyll-inspired white garden at Barrington Court |
 Espaliered apple tree at Barrington Court |
 Water lily in a pool at Barrington Court |
[edit] Notes
- ^ Somerset Historic Environment Record
- ^ The estate, with a house site that had been occupied since the eleventh century, was inherited in 1514 by Henry Daubeney, created Earl of Bridgewater for his services to Henry VIII, who began the new house but went bankrupt and was involved in the disgrace of Katherine Howard (Somerset Historic Environment Record).
- ^ Victoria County History: Somerset iv (1978) pp 112-14.
- ^ Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680 (Yale University Press) 1999, pp 75-78.
- ^ Barrington Court. Images of England. Retrieved on 2006-12-16.
- ^ An Invitation to Barrington Court. Stuart Interiors. Retrieved on 2007-10-15.
- ^ Gertrude Jekyll, Colour in the Flower Garden (1908).
