February 04, 2005

Good manors

Castle made to border

by marcus binney of the times

A fortress marauding Scots is now an essay in architecture

OPPORTUNITIES to buy Georgian country houses by famous architects are rare - especially at a price of £875,000. Hayton Hall, which stands in rolling country east of Carlisle, was designed by Sir Robert Smirke, the architect of the British Museum, and sensitively extended by his younger brother, Sydney.

Although Smirke is best known for grand Classical public buildings, here he designed a pioneer essay in Tudor Revival, the style adopted a decade later for the Houses of Parliament. There are hoodmoulds to the windows, pretty shaped gables and a porch with a trio of slender Gothic arches topped by pinnacles inspired by those on Henry VII's chapel at Westminster Abbey. But the Gothic is only skin-deep; this is really a very spacious Regency house with tall sash windows and lofty ceilings.

The added appeal of Hayton is that it is built of a very pretty, buff-coloured local sandstone with crisp, carved detail. The entrance front is neatly symmetrical, but picturesque elements are added with large bay windows on the west front and an ogee-domed lookout tower at the back. In the stable yard is a pele tower, one of the tall, square fortified towers found all over Northumberland and built as a defence against marauding Scots. In previous centuries Hayton was known as Edmond Castle, reflecting its role as a border stronghold. Smirke was employed by Thomas Henry Graham, whose family had owned the estate since the 17th century. Graham lived the comfortable life of a local squire, completing an astonishing 65 years as a magistrate before his death in 1881. Intriguingly, he commissioned Smirke to build his new house when he was just 30 years old, in 1824, the year he was High Sheriff.

Graham was devout, adding a new chancel to the church in the village of Hayton half a mile away. To ensure that he never missed a service, even in deep snow, he built a charming stone house in Norman style next to the church. The home had a pyramid-topped tower, and the family and servants would arrive there for the day each Sunday. He also built a chapel and parsonage in the village of Talkin, Cumbria.

Eric Graham, who inherited the house in 1937, had no children and obtained permission to break the entail that bound the estate to be handed down from one generation to another. A consortium of local businessmen bought the house and 51,000 acres for £7,500.

Fortunately they did not simply sell the timber and demolish the house, as often happened in the 1930s Depression, but sold the hall to the Home Office in 1942 for use as an approved school, having allowed Czech refugees to take shelter there in 1940. The school trained delinquent boys (as they were then called) in plastering, plumbing, painting, joinery and bricklaying, employing them to carry out repairs on the property and painting murals of rock'n roll singers, cowboys and undersea discovery.

When the school closed, Hayton was taken over as a country-house hotel. The underbidder was David Dyke, who instead bought a staff accommodation block and converted it into eight flats, selling one to a circuit judge. A year ago Dyke, 30 years after he first came to Hayton, fulfilled a dream by buying the rest of the estate. His metier is restoring and converting old buildings. He has recently done the Old Grammar School in nearby Brampton and earlier worked on Briery Close, overlooking Windermere. On leaving school he had obtained a place to study architecture at Nottingham College but decided instead to travel the world and obtained a position as a radio officer in the Merchant Navy. After five years at sea he returned to train radio operators at Wray Castle in the Lake District, and as a sideline started a property business.

He says of Hayton Hall: "I wanted to keep the main house intact. It's simply not suitable for horizontal division into apartments." The Sydney Smirke wing set back on the east is intended as a separate house, although one potential purchaser expressed interest in combining the two. Farther back, the chapel will become another self-contained house, with a conservatory on the exact site of the one that Sydney Smirke designed. The stables will be converted into 15 smaller houses and cottages. The architects are the London practice of Casson Conder, where Dyke's daughter, Tina, is a partner.

Below the house is a delightful lake complete with small island and now restocked with fish. That will be shared between the residents, as will some 30 acres of woodland walks. The long drive is also shared, but Hayton Hall has its own drive up to the house, with lawns on three sides. The front door opens into a large entrance hall, with Doric columns framing the view through to a grand staircase. The latter has an impressive cast -iron balustrade lit by a grand twin-lancet window on the half-landing.

The main rooms on the ground floor are designed to provide a circuit for entertaining, with one room leading to another. The double drawing room on the west is as brilliantly lit as a conservatory, with sashes and bay windows descending almost to the floor. In one bay French windows lead into the garden, in the other the sash is so tall that you can stroll through it. SmirkeÕs cornices are as crisp as if they were chiselled in stone and the beams are adorned with guilloches (a circling rope motif). The dining room is a place for serious candlelit dinners. Upstairs the landing has a pretty Rococo white marble fireplace. The seven bedrooms have bathrooms that were added when the house was a hotel; the temptation is to remove some of the partitions and to return subdivided rooms to their elegant Regency proportions.

One big surprise is the attic, adapted for a ballet dancer with a large practice floor under the roof but also suitable as a games room. It has a separate staircase and makes an unusual penthouse flat, with bedrooms shaped like tents nestling under steeply sloping eaves.