Secret Houses of the Cotswolds


Book Description

Secret Houses of the Cotswolds is a personal tour of twenty of the UK’s most beguiling houses in this much loved area of western England, defined by its distinctive honey-coloured stone, rolling hills, picturesque villages and the most traditional English landscape. Author and architectural historian, Jeremy Musson, and Cotswolds-based photographer Hugo Rittson Thomas, offer privileged access to twenty houses, from castles and manor houses, by way of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mansions, revealing their history, architecture and interiors, in the company of their devoted owners. In the footsteps of artists and designers from Georgian designers such as William Kent to Victorian visionary, William Morris, founder of the arts and crafts movement, we find a series of fascinating country houses of different sizes and atmospheres, which have shaped the English identity, and in different ways express the ideals of English life. Most of the houses included here are privately owned and not usually open to the public, and all of these houses featured in this book can be enjoyed through the eyes of owners, as well as an experienced architectural historian, and an award-winning photographer.




Secret Gardens of the Cotswolds


Book Description

A captivating portrait of the greatest British gardens and the lords, ladies and gardeners who own and manage them. Focusing on the counties of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, this stunning book features 20 gardens designed by some of the leading contemporary garden designers from across the world. This beautiful corner of England has a rich tradition of garden making, which is explored in this very personal view by photographer Hugo Rittson-Thomas and journalist Victoria Summerley, both residents of this green pocket with more than its fair share of beautiful and interesting gardens. Some of the gardens are strictly private, while others are regularly open to visitors, but all can now be savoured and enjoyed along with those who know them best.




Houses of the National Trust


Book Description

This captivating book, fully revised and updated and featuring more NT houses than ever before, is a guide to some of the greatest architectural treasures of Britain, encompassing both interior and exterior design. This new edition is fully revised and updated and includes entries for new properties including: Acorn Bank, Claife Viewing Station, Cushendun, Cwmdu, Fen Cottage, The Firs (birthplace of Edward Elgar), Hawker's Hut, Lizard Wireless Station, Totternhoe Knolls and Trelissick. The houses covered include spectacular mansions such as Petworth House and Waddesdon Manor, and more lowly dwellings such as the Birmingham Back to Backs and estate villages like Blaise Hamlet, near Bristol. In addition to houses, the book also covers fascinating buildings as diverse as churches, windmills, dovecotes, castles, follies, barns and even pubs. The book also acts as an overview of the country's architectural history, with every period covered, from the medieval stronghold of Bodiam Castle to the clean-lined Modernism of The Homewood. Teeming with stories of the people who lived and worked in these buildings: wealthy collectors (Charles Wade at Snowshill), captains of industry (William Armstrong at Cragside), prime ministers (Winston Churchill at Chartwell) and pop stars (John Lennon at Mendips). Written in evocative, imaginative prose and illustrated with glorious images from the National Trust's photographic library, this book is an essential guide to the built heritage of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.




Twenty First Century Cotswolds


Book Description

Twenty First Century Cotswolds, the first book from award-winning interior designer and spatial planner Pippa Paton, showcases the diversity of buildings in England's famously bucolic Cotswolds region, as well as the ways people choose to live in them. An exploration of the breadth of styles that fall under the heading of contemporary design, Twenty First Century Cotswolds provides insight into how these beautiful buildings can be transformed sympathetically for life today. The habitable structures of the Cotswolds may be hundreds of years old, but the way we live has changed dramatically over the centuries. Today the predominant desire is for open-plan, multifunctional family homes, and for inhabiting living spaces in completely new ways. An underlying demand for functionality, communication, ease of living, high- end technology and luxurious amenities has also shaped the way homes are being designed - and redesigned. Twenty First Century Cotswolds demonstrates a less invasive, specialist approach to transforming properties with ancient character for contemporary living. The focus has shifted towards exposing, enhancing and protecting the historical features and materials of these buildings, and celebrating their individual nature.




The Cotswold Cottage


Book Description

Cotswold Cottages have a warm beauty unequaled in rural Britain. The cottages have a character that has been determined by changes in local industry and farming, as well as by the properties of the building materials used, including the hard, honey-colored, Cotswold stone. Even the details like the tiny hinged windows, old planked doors and ironwork fittings were usually formed by local hands and have a style unique to the area. The Cotswold Cottage describes the key characteristics which define these cottages, their history and form, what they are made from, their interiors, and the colorful gardens around them. Trevor Yorke's carefully drawn diagrams and photographs, together with his easy-to-follow text, provide a wonderful introduction to these much loved Cotswold homes.




The Cotswolds


Book Description

With its gentle hills and timeless villages, the Cotswold countryside is a vision of natural beauty and rural calm, but it is also a region rich in history. In this new addition to the Landscapes of the Imagination series, Jane Bingham offers an intriguing portrait of the Cotswolds over the centuries, ranging from ancient stone circles and ruined Roman villas to the Cotswolds today, a picturesque destination spot popular with country-weekenders, tourists, and celebrities. Readers will visit fine churches and manor houses that have survived from the Middle Ages, and tour a landscape still bearing the scars of the Civil War. The home of kings and nobles since Saxon times, the region is famous for its elegant estates, such as Blenheim Palace--England's grandest stately home--while signs of the early industrial age can be seen in its mills and factories. Artists, musicians, and writers were also drawn to this rural paradise, from William Shakespeare and William Morris to T.S. Eliot and Ralph Vaughn Williams. Bingham captures it all in her charming portrait of this glorious spot in the heart of southern England.




Romantics and Classics


Book Description

Living today in the houses of the English countryside, owners blend contemporary style with the old, good bones of manor houses and country seats, redefining the notion of English country and creating interiors that are both chic and intimate. English country house style looms large in the collective imagination, inspiring fantasies of life in a centuries-old manor house, overlooking verdant hills dotted with sheep. This book allows us to enter some of the most exceptional of England's historic houses that are lived in and decorated for today by their imaginative owners and designers. Jeremy Musson and Hugo Rittson Thomas have assembled a stunning collection of twenty charming homes that reveal a remarkable wealth of taste and style inspiration, both inside and out, ranging from traditional and classic to contemporary and bohemian, with examples including Haddon Hall, Smedmore, Court of Noke, and The Laskett. Musson's text illuminates the history of each home, showing how each has become a canvas upon which its owner has deeply imprinted their personality. Essays on furniture, gardens, and color expand upon three essential components of country style. Rittson Thomas's superb photography captures the telling details in natural-lit interiors and exquisite gardens. This volume is sure to appeal to Instagram fanatics and traditionalists alike.




The Cotswold Collection


Book Description

The new third edition of this book has been redesigned and transformed with many new images. This book of photography captures the very essence of the Cotswolds, now more than ever becoming a major weekend destination for those seeking the charm and beauty of the English countryside. Here you have the domesticity of the villages, the "Wool" churches and manor houses, the gentle rivers valleys, the rolling hills and dales and cottage gardens. The resulting images are striking and although they may be of familiar locations - they are rarely familiar photographs.




Special Places to Stay - The Cotswolds


Book Description

Famous for its cobbled streets and honey-stone cottages, bustling market towns and breathtaking scenery, the Cotswolds are high on the list of places to visit for anyone serious about exploring Britain's countryside. In our new small format guide to this much-loved area we have bought together over 100 Special Places to Stay: B&Bs, self-catering cottages, hotels, inns and pubs with rooms - all inspected, all good value, and chosen because we like them. Book into a Georgian manor whose owners can organise a day's fishing or cycling in the grounds of William Morris' old country residence. Walk The Cotswold Way and reward yourself with a night in a magnificent Grade-I listed manor, waking to the sizzling of Gloucester Old Spot bacon and fresh eggs for breakfast.




Secret Cotswolds


Book Description

A miscellany of curious local Cotswold stories accompanied by hand-drawn images.