The country house is dead: that’s why we love it so

The true English disease is Downton Syndrome. Symptoms include a yearning for a past of chivalry, grandeur and unambiguously stratified social order, where Johnny Foreigner had no place unless perhaps as butler in the pantry or mistress in the bedroom. And the focus of the disease is the country house, Britain’s best contribution to the world history of architecture. Except often the architect was Johnny Foreigner.

The typologies are well understood: from great halls with their Tudor feasts to Italianate palazzi, with Alexander Pope scribbling in the garden; thence to disturbing Victorian horrors corrupting their inhabitants (q.v. Balmoral), lovable Arts & Crafts by Lutyens and, latterly, the wince-making middle-brow pastiches of Quinlan Terry (whose clients include Michael Heseltine and Nicholas Coleridge).

The first thing to understand about the country house is that we love the past because it is safer there: ‘Our dates are brief and therefore we admire/What thou dost foist upon us that is old.’ Something in contemporary Britain makes this very poignant.

The second thing is a country house is not simply a house in the country. That would be to misunderstand the fine gradations of snobbery that are Britain’s greatest art form. Instead, as Clive Aslet explains in his genial new book, it is ‘a work of domestic architecture in a rural location, surrounded by its own land… intended to seem a self-contained unit’. In other words, a quasi-feudal private property.

Although he does not dodge the issue that we are in the territory of rich white men whose wealth often derived from sources which today require discussion, Aslet, a long-time editor of Country Life — whose original offices were designed by Lutyens — leans towards a good-natured narrative rather than a withering critique.