Cloverley Hall, which was built by Nesfield and Shaw in 1865-8, attracted much favourable contemporary attention largely because of the superb craftsmanship of the brickwork and the originality of the japoniste ornament (see Chapter [12]). It is destroyed now except for the extensive service and stable wings and the gate lodge; but the amount and the character of the fenestration, providing in some areas what amounted to window-walls of stone-mullioned and transomed lights, and the character of the plan make it still memorable. It was also the first of the many notable Late Victorian manor houses which both Nesfield and Shaw would build when working alone.
Figure 23. Philip Webb: Arisaig, Inverness-shire, 1863, plan
Like Arisaig, Cloverley was a large country house. The medieval great hall, first rather modestly revived by Pugin at Scarisbrick, here returned at full scale; but it was placed in a corner of the main block—as was occasionally its position in the sixteenth century—so that it might receive light from one end as well as from the side (Figure [24]). From the entrance, however, one passed by this hall through the ‘screens’ under a gallery to arrive at a stair-hall, more in the manner of Waterhouse’s and Webb’s, around which the other principal rooms were compactly grouped. There was also here a very skilful play with levels, the hall being lower than the rest of the main floor, and therefore part-way down to the basement—containing a billiard room and so forth—which was entirely above ground at the rear of the house.
Figure 24. Nesfield & Shaw: Cloverley Hall, Shropshire, 1865-8, plan
While Cloverley Hall was still in construction, Shaw had begun his own personal career as a house-builder at Glen Andred in 1866-7 (Plate [102B]), where he introduced a more vernacular manner (see Chapter [12]). Following this came his Leyswood in 1868-9, a mansion as large as Cloverley Hall and in some of its decorative features more archaeologically Late Medieval. As at Cloverley Hall, the amplitude of the fenestration, however, arranged here in long mullioned bands as well as in tall window-walls, has seemed more significant to posterity than the stylistic detailing[[331]] (Plate [123]). Above all, Leyswood marked a further stage in the development of the ‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure [19]), of which the first well-publicized example was Waterhouse’s at Hinderton. Here the great hall and the stair-hall of Cloverley are combined to form a central spatial core of communication, somewhat as at Webb’s Arisaig, but the shape of this is quite irregular and the reception rooms are grouped very loosely about it, more as at Benfleet Hall. Projecting well out of the main block, the dining-room and the drawing-room both receive light from three sides. Moreover, the space of these rooms is articulated, as in certain Picturesque houses of forty and fifty years earlier, by ingle-nooks, oriels, and various other irregularities. Perspectives of Leyswood—not the plan[[332]]—were published in the supplement to the Building News of 31 March 1871 and made at once a tremendous impression both in England and in America (Plate [123]).
Figure 25. Philip Webb: Barnet, Hertfordshire, Trevor Hall,
1868-70, plan
In a house by Webb of the same date as Leyswood, Trevor Hall at Oakleigh Park, Barnet, in Hertfordshire, the arrangement of the rooms about the central hall was much more compact (Figure [25]). The whole formed a square and allowed a quite symmetrical treatment of the three principal fronts. This house is now destroyed except for the gate lodge. Less interesting in plan but significant for its very modest size is Webb’s Upwood Gorse, Caterham, Surrey, built for Queen Victoria’s dentist Sir John Tomes also in 1868. The consistency and the simplicity with which the local vernacular of brick below and tile-hanging above is handled in connexion with plenty of white-painted Queen Anne sash-windows regularly but not symmetrically spaced offers a curiously close prototype of the American ‘Shingle Style’, although the initiators of that mode a decade later can hardly have known of this house, since it was never published. It was rather Shaw’s houses of the next decade, of which his drawings were exhibited each year at the Royal Academy and given great prominence in the professional Press, that provided the exemplars which architects generally imitated both at home and abroad; from 1874 on the plans were usually illustrated as well as Shaw’s own very virtuoso pen-drawn[[333]] perspectives (Plate [123]).