You’d expect the buildings in a historic city like Rome, Shanghai, or London to be a veritable Who’s Who of architectural styles—and they are. As you walk down the street, you’ll find a timeline of aesthetics dating back centuries. But there’s a surprising location you can visit for an encyclopedic look at architecture: the English countryside. The tradition of the country house has its roots in the Tudor period, though it continued through the 19th century. Over the course of those years, manors employed styles that ranged from Baroque to Palladian, Jacobean to Art Deco in both architecture and decor. In his new book English House Style From the Archives of Country Life ($95, Rizzoli), author John Goodall surveys the different architectural modes across a number of iconic country homes, pulling from the archives of the legendary British publication Country Life, of which he serves as architectural editor.
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Despite the seemingly disparate appearances of each manor, Goodall has found a common bond between them. “...[A]s someone who visits large numbers of country houses, I am struck by one quality that, if it is not uniquely British, nevertheless does seem both distinctive and noteworthy: it’s that so many of these homes accommodate a particular lifestyle associated with the outdoors—of dogs and horses, of muddy boots and riding crops,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “The result is that grand architecture and objects of great beauty are often mixed informally with the prosaic and the practical. In this mix, English country houses become homes as well.”
Here, we peek inside some of the country manors from English House Style.
