Release date: 15th November 2012
Published by: Frances Lincoln
ISBN No: 978 0711233393
Revised edition
The magnificent country houses built in Britain between 1890 and 1939 were the
last monuments to a vanishing age. Many of these great mammoths of domestic
architecture were unsuited to the changes in economic and social priorities that
followed the two world wars, and rapidly became extinct. Those that survive,
however, provide tangible evidence of the life and death of an extraordinarily
prosperous age. Originally published in 1980, long out of print and now
thoroughly revised and reillustrated, this book recounts the architectural and
social history of the era, describing the clients, the architects, the styles
and accoutrements of the country houses. The people who could afford them - the
Carnegies, the Astors, the Leverhulmes - had grown rich by exploiting the new
economic opportunities of the age, and the houses they built in the years before
the First World War reflect the desire for two contrasting ways of life. The
social country house was the setting for the opulent world associated with
Edward VII. The romantic country house was simpler, more genuinely rural, for
those who wanted to be in closer contact with the countryside and the vanishing
rural crafts, or who wanted an idyll of the past that did not suggest the world
of the motor car. These traditions lost coherence after the war, and the period
ended with a number of spectacular, and often eccentric, houses. Some of the
most remarkable were those that not only replicated the look of old buildings,
but used genuinely old materials and even incorporated whole Tudor buildings
moved from other places. Clive Aslet writes of the immense changes in the way
country houses of this period were lived in and used. The shortage of servants,
aggravated by the First World War, spurred numerous developments in the
technology of the country house - vacuum cleaners, washing machines, telephones
and central heating were called upon to replace the army of servants who never
returned from the trenches or the factories. Interior decorators, becoming
increasingly in vogue, developed the style Louis Seize into the last word in
Edwardian chic. Gardens came to be seen as integral to the concept of the
country house and reconciled formal planning with informal planting. This
fascinating world, so popularly depicted in Downton Abbey, can now be viewed
from a new perspective. The Edwardian Country House will enlighten and entertain
all those interested in glimpsing the lost life style of another age.
Copyright: The Book Depository Synopsis
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