Clive Aslet - An Exuberant Catalogue of Dreams : The Americans Who Revived the Country House in Britain read TXT, FB2, DOC
9781781310946 English 1781310947 For centuries Britain s country houses had been the exclusive preserve of their traditional landed gentry of lords and ladies, their tenancy legitimized by time-honored ancestry and the accident of birth. But starting in the late nineteenth century an entirely different kind of proprietor began to take up residence. American money lots of it came across the Atlantic, in the form of wealthy, eligible heiresses like the Vanderbilts, and fabulously wealthy industrialists and self-made men like William Waldorf Astor and newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst. Their money purchased grand houses like Cliveden, St Donat s and Leeds Castle; it saved vast piles like Blenheim from dereliction and decay; it brought modern facilities like electric lighting and hot water, Art Deco interior styling and, in the case of houses like North Mymms, turned them into magnificent repositories of cultural artefacts to rival New York s Frick Collection. Not infrequently the American newcomer (usually female) found the world of the English aristocracy they had married into to be dauntingly austere and emotionally starved; others, like Chips Channon, or May Goelet at Scotland s Floors Castle, brought a gay, hedonistic sociability. Still other Americans, like Lawrence Johnston laying out the garden at Hidcote or latterly John Paul Getty with his idyllic cricket ground at Wormsley, successfully managed to make themselves more English than the English. Clive Aslet s fabulously illustrated book is the first study of this remarkable and unlikely juxtaposition of two very different cultures, which changed the architecture, the society and the character of English country houses forever.", To a modern visitor nothing will seem more British than a classic country house like Cliveden or Leeds Castle. But the truth is actually very different. That such fabulous places exist in their present form - or in the case of, say, Blenheim, survive in the ownership of the family - is as much as anything down to American money and taste. Now, for the first time, Clive Aslet's magnificent book reveals the extent of this remarkable phenomenon. Covering eighteen Americans and their houses - from the captivating May Goelet and Floors Castle in Scotland to the big game hunter Willie James and West Dean Park on the south coast - he illustrates the varied destinies by which stupendously wealthy Americans ended up owning great stately piles, and the variety of transformations they wrought upon them. Some of the marriages between aristocrats and heiresses were happy, others distinctly less so. Dowries went on new roofs to keep the rain out and electric lighting and central heating to modernise dwellings that could be as wintry as the hearts of their ancestral owners. For self-made magnates like William Randolph Hearst or Gordon Selfridge a country house was a rich man's folly - Hearst filled St Donat's castle in Wales with untold fittings and trophies but hardly ever visited it, Selfridge's pharaonic vision for Hengistbury Head never escaped the drawing board. For others, like Andrew Carnegie at Skibo or Sir Paul Getty at Wormsley, it was the chance to out-do the natives by creating idylls of baronial splendour or arcadian cricket fields. But the American influence, as Clive Aslet shows, was lasting, and profound beyond architecture and design. What became known as the 'country house look' was codified by an American - Nancy Lancaster. The greatest of early twentieth-century gardens, Hidcote, was created by an American, Lawrence Johnston. It was an American romance - with Wallis Simpson at Fort Belvedere - that caused Edward VIII to abdicate. Illustrated throughout with magnificent photographs, An Exuberant Catalogue of Dreams is a fascinating chronicle of how it happened that, as Gladstone's Chancellor of the Exchequer remarked in 1898, 'We are all Americans now'.
9781781310946 English 1781310947 For centuries Britain s country houses had been the exclusive preserve of their traditional landed gentry of lords and ladies, their tenancy legitimized by time-honored ancestry and the accident of birth. But starting in the late nineteenth century an entirely different kind of proprietor began to take up residence. American money lots of it came across the Atlantic, in the form of wealthy, eligible heiresses like the Vanderbilts, and fabulously wealthy industrialists and self-made men like William Waldorf Astor and newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst. Their money purchased grand houses like Cliveden, St Donat s and Leeds Castle; it saved vast piles like Blenheim from dereliction and decay; it brought modern facilities like electric lighting and hot water, Art Deco interior styling and, in the case of houses like North Mymms, turned them into magnificent repositories of cultural artefacts to rival New York s Frick Collection. Not infrequently the American newcomer (usually female) found the world of the English aristocracy they had married into to be dauntingly austere and emotionally starved; others, like Chips Channon, or May Goelet at Scotland s Floors Castle, brought a gay, hedonistic sociability. Still other Americans, like Lawrence Johnston laying out the garden at Hidcote or latterly John Paul Getty with his idyllic cricket ground at Wormsley, successfully managed to make themselves more English than the English. Clive Aslet s fabulously illustrated book is the first study of this remarkable and unlikely juxtaposition of two very different cultures, which changed the architecture, the society and the character of English country houses forever.", To a modern visitor nothing will seem more British than a classic country house like Cliveden or Leeds Castle. But the truth is actually very different. That such fabulous places exist in their present form - or in the case of, say, Blenheim, survive in the ownership of the family - is as much as anything down to American money and taste. Now, for the first time, Clive Aslet's magnificent book reveals the extent of this remarkable phenomenon. Covering eighteen Americans and their houses - from the captivating May Goelet and Floors Castle in Scotland to the big game hunter Willie James and West Dean Park on the south coast - he illustrates the varied destinies by which stupendously wealthy Americans ended up owning great stately piles, and the variety of transformations they wrought upon them. Some of the marriages between aristocrats and heiresses were happy, others distinctly less so. Dowries went on new roofs to keep the rain out and electric lighting and central heating to modernise dwellings that could be as wintry as the hearts of their ancestral owners. For self-made magnates like William Randolph Hearst or Gordon Selfridge a country house was a rich man's folly - Hearst filled St Donat's castle in Wales with untold fittings and trophies but hardly ever visited it, Selfridge's pharaonic vision for Hengistbury Head never escaped the drawing board. For others, like Andrew Carnegie at Skibo or Sir Paul Getty at Wormsley, it was the chance to out-do the natives by creating idylls of baronial splendour or arcadian cricket fields. But the American influence, as Clive Aslet shows, was lasting, and profound beyond architecture and design. What became known as the 'country house look' was codified by an American - Nancy Lancaster. The greatest of early twentieth-century gardens, Hidcote, was created by an American, Lawrence Johnston. It was an American romance - with Wallis Simpson at Fort Belvedere - that caused Edward VIII to abdicate. Illustrated throughout with magnificent photographs, An Exuberant Catalogue of Dreams is a fascinating chronicle of how it happened that, as Gladstone's Chancellor of the Exchequer remarked in 1898, 'We are all Americans now'.