ARTS
Conservation
Profit with honour
Simon Courtauld on a sympathetic approach to restoring a grand country house In 1989, not long before the spectacular collapse of his company Polly Peck, the Turkish Cypriot Asil Nadir paid £9 million for a spectacular house — Burley-on-the- Hill, in Leicestershire. Nadir is now await- ing trial on a string of fraud charges, but the house remains intact and unspoilt: his plans to turn it into a super-conference hotel and golfing centre got nowhere. A year ago the architect Kit Martin bought this glorious late-17th-century pile from the official receiver for £2.75 million and is about to start on its restoration. He is con- vening Burley into 26 self-contained, free- hold houses and cottages.
As we look south from the balustrade on the lawn, over a herd of Formosan sika deer, down the former carriage drive flanked by woodland and across the great stretch of Rutland Water, Martin tells me we are surveying five counties. Behind us stands the four-storeyed baroque façade with, on the north front, a remarkable semi-circular tour d'honneur, its colon- nades inspired by St Peter's in Rome.
Martin appears rather casually uncom- mercial. 'Some people might have brought in the cement mixers immediately,' he says. `But I have done the more important things first.' He has removed the unsightly tennis court in the garden, introduced the deer into the park and raised the family flag three turrets and three martlets — on Bur- ley's roof. Far from being daunted, howev- er, by the prospect of restoring this house (most of it has been unoccupied for years), Martin is excited by how simple it will be. Having worked on seven other grand coun- try mansions over the past 17 years, his is a well-tried and successful formula.
Both Martin's parents, and his grandfa- ther, practised as architects. Father's influ- ence, however, was short-lived: though young Kit worked for a time in Sir Leslie Martin's office, he did not find himself in sympathy with the views of the left-wing, Modernist professor of architecture at Cambridge. He preferred to devote himself to saving and restoring listed buildings.
The key to the financing of projects such as Burley — after a bank has provided funds to purchase the property — is to sell most of the self-contained houses once the plans have been drawn up and before any building or conversion work has been done. This is the kind of forward selling one asso- ciates with a booming property market; yet such is Martin's record that he does not anticipate any problems at Burley.
Starting in 1976 with Dingley Hall, Northamptonshire, a derelict shell of an originally Elizabethan house, Martin initi- ated what was soon to become his hall- mark: the vertical division of the property, providing a number of separate houses, each with its own front door and patch of garden. Other architects have made a series of apartments in large country hous- es by adding lots of partitioning and even mezzanine floors. But Martin's work involves a minimum of structural alter- ation, and he is always concerned to avoid cutting the principal rooms of a house in two. The H plan of Dingley was especially well suited to the Martin approach. So, too, are those houses such as Gunton Park, near Cromer in north Norfolk, rescued by him in 1980, which have additions to the original building, and his four-storeyed properties — Keith Hall, Aberdeenshire, Tyninghame and Burley — which permit the creation of some pretty large 'units'.
The East Wing at Burley, for instance, will have several large reception rooms on two floors, then six bedrooms on the upper floors. It already has its own front door with double stone steps and wrought-iron railings leading to a garden and a private five-acre block of parkland. 'I think of this one as being rather like a grand house in Bath,' Martin said. Party walls will have to be put in on some floors, to divide one wing from another. And in making six houses out of the main house, Martin will have to put in two and a half new staircas- Watercolour drawing by Humphrey Repton of Burley-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire es. If this sounds problematic, it is child's play to an architect who, in past years, has twice had to start from burnt-out wrecks.
Most of the main rooms at Burley are no more than a manageable 20 foot square; the huge central hall and ballroom above will be restored and shared by all the occu- pants. Martin's plans for 26 self-contained houses involve converting other wings and outhouses and buildings in the walled gar- den. One of the beauties of his scheme, and of the vertical division of the houses, is that the work can be done piecemeal. Any- one who fancies a Martin house can go and see what he has done at Gunton Park (where he lives), and discuss the colour of the walls with him before the reconstruc- tion is completed.
But not all the work can be funded by purchasers before it is begun. There is dry rot needing attention at the top of the main house; there is restoration work to be done to the long colonnades at the front of the house; and there are three gardeners fully employed clearing undergrowth and the accumulation of three years of neglect. One of the houses, in the main building, incorporates a spectacular staircase and ceiling painted by Gerrard Lanscroon, which will cost around £60,000 to clean and restore.
Thanks to Asil Nadir, Martin had no problem obtaining planning permission for his scheme. Rutland District Council must have been mightily relieved by the plan, after the shock of the eccentric Turkish Cypriot's proposal to turn Burley into a hotel complex with two golf courses, adding a mirror-glass wing to the main house. A blast of outrage from the Geor- gian Group persuaded Nadir to put for- ward a marginally less unacceptable scheme, after which the planning authori- ties never heard from him again. Having got £9 million for Burley from Nadir, 'Joss' Hanbury, whose family is descended from the Earl of Nottingham and Winchilsea who built the house in the 1690s, bought back most of the land, plus a few houses and cottages, from Martin last year for around £2 million.
Under Martin's aegis, the future of Bur- ley now seems assured for generations to come — in private, if multiple, ownership and with virtually no disturbance to the existing structures. Of course, it may be questioned whether the character of a great house is best preserved by dividing it up; but what are the alternatives, if it is no longer practicable as a private house? Some soulless institutional use, or the slow road to dereliction? It is surely the best solution that the house should be sympa- thetically restored and lived in, with the additional advantage — how can one put it? — that it remains in British hands.
With mild contempt, Kit Martin recalls the comments which Nicholas Ridley, when Environment Secretary, made to the His- toric Houses Association. He was not impressed, Ridley had said, by the prob- lems of the anciens pauvres; if they could not keep their old family seats going, they should make way for the nouveaux riches who would do a much better job. Ridley's `new men', as Martin refers to them, include Nadir (Burley), Alan Bond (Glympton) and Abdul al-Ghazi (Heveningham), all very nouveaux riches for a time, not to say foreign, but soon bankrupt. The new men to whom Martin sells at Burley-on-the-Hill will surely be better bets.
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