As I type this, it is raining steadily outside and there is even the occasional rumble of thunder, which is unusual for the Puget Sound area. We’ve had a lot of warm, sunny days recently, which makes us think of our summers, and that makes the rain extremely welcome. People who haven’t lived in Seattle know that it rains here “a lot” (only 44 inches a year where we are, but it’s always slow rain), but don’t know that we typically go 90 days without any precipitation at all in the summer. When we moved here, my husband did a little research and pronounced that we had “Cardiff winters and Majorca summers.” Which sounds pretty nice, to me.
Weather like this puts me into dreaming mode, especially in the springtime when things are leafed out like this, dreaming about my theoretical country house.
Being American, and being a native Midwesterner, it might seem strange to hear that I’ve lived in several places with country-house-like estates near them. When we lived in Illinois we were near Allerton Park, which has a “big house” and lots of outbuildings situated on 1,500 acres of wooded land. It has a walled garden, a series of formal gardens (including a fabulous peony garden), gardeners’ bothies, and follies. It was built by Robert Allerton, a banking magnate and consummate Anglophile, in the 1920s and 30s. It is absolutely delightful.
We were also within striking distance of Ewing Manor, a neo-Tudor mansion and gardens plus a recreation of the Globe Theater, in which a Shakespeare festival is held every summer. This is a far smaller estate than Allerton, but extremely beautiful and built with much love.
Now, in the Puget Sound area, we have the Bloedel Reserve. This 150-acre property contains a 2-mile walking trail through both a Pacific Northwest woodland and a series of informal gardens. There’s a guesthouse, a gatehouse, a picturesque sheep shed, and a reveal of the main house and its reflecting pond that always makes me say “I have never seen a place so happily situated.” Monty Don visited it for American Gardens, and when I go I always make a point of sitting on the bench by the reflecting pool that he sat on.
Walking around these places makes me appreciate just how insanely wealthy the builders of England’s big country houses were. America had obscene wealth in the early 20th century (it still has it), with oil and railway and newspaper barons amassing ridiculous fortunes and building ridiculous houses which, sadly enough, tended to be torn down when their owners could no longer afford them. America just never had the social structure to keep them up–and I mean that as a good thing, democracy and all, though it’s sad that we couldn’t keep so many beautiful estates somehow, some way, for some public purpose.
Walking through Bloedel, and previously while walking through Allerton (and touring the house once, during a special weekend when it was open), I think about the public purposes that big houses often served, and which they rightly were expected to serve. I’ve noted recently that they were expected to hold season fetes as well as conventions for various organizations. I often feel that their libraries and gardens should have been open to the public, and indeed, they sometimes were. People should have been housed in all those bedrooms and fed by those enormous kitchens… and that is where my dreaming about “shoulds” trails off into reality.
Country houses were 1. Built on the backs of enslaved people. Let’s never forget that. And, 2. Upheld a class system that Americans have always consciously seen as anathema (whether or not American social class is really as fluid as we’d like to think is, of course, ripe for discussion). You were not invited for a fancy dinner unless you’d been born Somebody. You did not hunt. You did not fish. You (probably) did not frolic in the pleasure gardens. Fetes and benefits were held at the pleasure of The Family. The library and cabinet of curiosities were nearly always reserved for friends. People who lived in the cottages and gatehouse and bothies were employees, and hard driven. “Service” in the UK was like being in the military–it was your whole life, and you did nothing but serve.
So anyway. These are weights we all carry on our backs when we dream about life in the English country house. And yet…
I think I’d like a Georgian pile, because wouldn’t we all. I’d like it to have a long gallery, good for hanging pictures and also for walking in on rainy days. I’d like it to have a huge library, absolutely lined with bookshelves and populated in the center by lots of good squashy sofas and armchairs. I’d like it to have a museum or cabinet of curiosities, too, because the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum is my favorite museum exhibit, ever.
Beyond that I don’t have special wishes for the interior of the house. Plenty of bedrooms, a big dining room, and an absolute warren of pantries and sculleries and still rooms and closets, I suppose. I am a hobbit at heart.
And outdoors, a few formal gardens but mostly a small park surrounded by a forest of oaks, among which live a herd of white deer. I am very specific on this. If I get to dream about my house it’s old oak trees and white deer. I don’t care to hunt or fish, I just want to see them stray across the lawn in the early morning, when it’s misty and the first light is just touching the oak leaves. Because that deep-green tapestry, the complexity of its repetition and depth of its color? That’s what the inside of my mind looks like.
And that’s how my ideal country house looks, too.
Frost and Fog 