The serene interior

The remodelling of an Elizabethan house by an Edwardian industrialist created superb interiors in the aesthetic of 17th-century Dutch art, Jeremy Musson discovers

PASSING through the front door of Longstowe Hall, the modern visitor would be forgiven for imagining that they had stepped into a 17th-century Dutch painting. In the hall—and the spaces radiating off it—the fall of natural light animates the rich surfaces and textures of stone, marble, wood, plaster and metal to create serene interiors. Old oak combines with marquetry pieces and fragments of Continental carving. The illusion is not an accident. It underlines an intense admiration in about 1900—when these spaces were reworked in their present form—for the paintings of artists such as Jan Steen and Johannes Vermeer. Exactly the same aesthetic is apparent in the early architectural photography of COUNTRY LIFE.

Longstowe Hall is, in origin, an Elizabethan brick manor house built on a traditional E-plan. As the of 1867 notes, however, it was ‘almost rebuilt’ by Cambridge architect William Fawcett for the then owner, one Sidney Stanley. From this era, the house retains its huge, west-facing drawing room, with a French-style