Compton Place

Compton Place
Location: Compton Place Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 1EB
Coordinates:
Area: United Kingdom
Built for: Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington
Rebuilt: 1726–31
Restored: 1800
Restored by: Colen Campbell
Listed Building – Grade I
Official name: Compton Place
Designated: 27 May 1949
Reference #: 293552
Location of Compton Place in United Kingdom East Sussex

Compton Place is an English country house in Eastbourne, a town and borough in East Sussex. It was rebuilt for Sir Spencer Compton, to designs by Colen Campbell from 1726,[1] and completed after Campbell's death by William Kent.[2] The Elizabethan-Jacobean house called Bourne Place had Spencer Compton, treasurer to George, Prince of Wales, as its tenant since 1714. In 1724 Compton liked the place well enough to purchase it and its estate outright and to rename it Compton Place; the Prince of Wales was Colen Campbell's chief patron, and it was natural for Spencer Compton to turn to him for its design.

The E-shaped plan, of which the central range had been doubled in depth in the seventeenth century, was retained. Campbell presented a plan for the south elevation, which was modified in the execution, but he was principally involved in remaking the interiors, where his presence is commemorated in the stucco portrait bust of him in the soffit of the bay window at the south end of the Gallery, which is the sole surviving contemporary image of the Scottish architect; the plasterwork is associated with the "three Germans" alluded to in the correspondence from Lord Wilmington's gardener William Stuart, one of whom is thought to have been the Anglo-Danish stuccator Charles Stanley.[3] The London plasterer John Hughes supervised the plasterwork. Carving in the house was by the London carver John Richards.[4]

Opening out of the south end of the Gallery are state bedroom with alcoves. Engravings of the alcove and the compartmented ceiling of the East Bedroom (later called the "Duchess's Bedroom") appear in Campbells Five Orders. The Duke's Bedroom", "one of the most opulent examples in England",[5] has a stucco relief following Titian's Venus and Adonis; there are smaller stucco relief panels of Paris with Helen and Diana with Endymion.

Sir Spencer was created Earl of Wilmington in 1728. At his death in 1743, Compton Place passed to his nephew the 5th Earl of Northampton. In 1806 the brick and flint exterior was faced with stucco and composition and a Doric peristyle was added to the bay window.[6] In 1858 the estate passed to the 7th Duke of Devonshire, who laid out the new town of Eastbourne on the south half of the estate.[7] More recently the park north and east of the house has been laid out in golf courses of the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club, (founded in 1887), whose first President was William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, and the dukes continue to be Presidents; the two golf links are named for the Duke of Devonshire and his eldest son, the Marquess of Hartington.[8]

In 1954, as part of the 11th Duke's retrenchment following the 80% death duties levied on his father's estate, the house was let to a language school, and its successor remains in residence as of 2009.

Notes

  1. ^ The contractor on the site was John Lane.
  2. ^ G.L.M. Goodfellow, "Colin Campbell's last years", The Burlington Magazine 111 No. 793 (April 1969: 185-191), pp 186, 189, and figs.
  3. ^ A Danish biography of Stanley written by A.F. Busching in 1757 notes he worked in England for almost twenty years (1727-46) and, among other patrons "with fame for My lord Willington in Eastbourne, Sussex" (quoted by Geoffrey Beard, Decorative Plasterwork in Great Britain, 1975:59.
  4. ^ Goodfellow 1969:189.
  5. ^ Beard 1975:59; the ceiling is Beard's plate 68, the plasterwork portrait medallion, his plate 70.
  6. ^ Noted by Goodfellow 1969:189 note 7; this may have been among the work done at Compton Place under the direction of John Harvey, a former assistant of Samuel Wyatt (Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840, 3rd ed. 1995, s.v. "Harvey, John") Francis Bernasconi was paid £1754 18s. for stucco, compo, coloring inside works, according to Beard 1975:205.
  7. ^ Goodfellow 1969:189 note 7.
  8. ^ Royal Eastbourne Golf Club