# Berrydown Court

Berrydown Court is a late 19th-century country house, on the B3400 road between the villages of Ashe and Overton in Hampshire, England. The house was built in 1897-1898 and was designed by Edwin Lutyens. Berrydown is a Grade I listed building, and its entrance lodge and boundary walls are also listed at Grade I.

## History

Berrydown Court was built for Archibald Grove (1855-1920), founder-editor of the New Review magazine, and member of parliament for West Ham North (1892-95) and South Northamptonshire (1906-10). Grove was a personal friend of Edwin Lutyens and began discussions regarding the construction of a house in Hampshire in around 1890, when Grove had bought land in the Overton area and was attempting to find a parliamentary seat in the county. Disagreements between client and architect delayed the commencement of building until 1897, but the house was complete by 1898. The construction saw further friction between Grove and Lutyens, particularly in relation to the garden, which the latter had planned in conjunction with Gertrude Jekyll. Jane Brown, in her study of the Lutyens/Jekyll partnership, Gardens of a Golden Afternoon, suggests that the couple failed fully to appreciate the challenges of the site, without a view and immediately adjacent to a road, and also misunderstood the underlying soil, such that, in 1899, William Robinson, a friend of both, was called in to suggest solutions. Grove sold the estate in 1904 to Edward Cooper, an underwriter and partner in Hartley, Cooper and Co. The estate was resold on a number of occasions in the 20th and 21st centuries, until bought by the present owners in 2001. During their tenure, a major restoration of the house and gardens has been undertaken. Berrydown remains a private house and is not open to the public.

## Architecture and description

Berrydown is of two-storeys with an attic floor. It is shielded from the road by a long boundary wall, which also forms the northern wall of the kitchen garden and is pierced by a gate lodge. Colin Amery, Margaret Richardson and Gavin Stamp, in the catalogue published to accompany the 1981 Hayward Gallery exhibition, Lutyens - The work of the English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), describe the entrance front as "Tudor" in style. The garden front, which Roderick Gradidge considered "surprisingly complex", has massive gables, is tile-hung and the roof carries three large chimney stacks. The interior plan is simple, has seen little change since its construction, and was subject to a full restoration, supported by the Lutyens Trust, in the early 21st century. During the restoration wall murals by Lutyens, depicting birds and figures and including one considered to be a depiction of his daughter Barbara, were uncovered.
Michael Bullen, James Crook and Rodney Hubbuck, in their Hampshire: Winchester and the North volume in the Pevsner Buildings of England series, revised and published in 2010, note that Berrydown is among the least studied of all of Lutyens' larger houses. Lawrence Weaver, in his monumental study, Lutyens Houses and Gardens, published in 1921 did not mention the house at all. It is also one of the less appreciated of his early designs; Christopher Hussey, in his biography of Lutyens, described it as "undistinguished", although he was more complimentary of the stables, gatehouse lodge and boundary wall, which he thought reminiscent of Randolph Caldecott's paintings of Surrey farms. In the later 20th, and 21st centuries, the house has been the subject of some reappraisal. Gradidge described the road frontage as "bland", but considered the garden front of much greater interest, with early evidence of Arts and Crafts and Art Deco inspirations. Bullen, Crook and Hubbuck consider the house an "extraordinary composition".
Berrydown is a Grade I listed building, and its entrance lodge and boundary walls are also listed at Grade I.