Building record MDO32954 - Garden house at Duntish Court, also known as Castle Hill, Buckland Newton

A summer house incorporating the mullioned stone windows of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century building, set into flint walls. The windows are though to have come from an early post-medieval house situated near by which was demolished before the building of Duntish Court around 1760. The brick and flint building is clad in places with wood arranged to form columns and other elements of classical architecture.

Mowl comments at length on the summerhouse in the context of contemporary fashion and prejudices <2>. A generator is situated under the summer house.

<1> Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), 1970, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the County of Dorset, Volume III (Central) Part 1, 52 (Monograph). SDO146.

'(4) Castle Hill … The mullioned stone windows from a 16th or 17th-century building are reset in the flint wall of a Summer House, 100 yds. W. of the main building. They are chamfered and hollow-chamfered and have plain labels. They probably come from the earlier house, which stood to the S. of the 18th-century building (Hutchins, III, 708); Thomas Barnes repaired it in the 17th century (Coker, 95). '

<2> Mowl, T, 2003, Historic Gardens of Dorset (Monograph). SDO12480.

'Then there is that so-called ‘Summerhouse’ in a dark wood at Castle Hill, or Duntish Court, Sir William Chambers’ severe 1764 villa, which was demolished in the uncaring 1960s. The Summerhouse was a joke, or should I say a rictus, on the face of Sir William, an intensely correct classical architect. It was cluttered up with wood and workmen’s garden gear when I saw it, appropriately so as Chambers never intended this gloomy bothy as a summerhouse; it was later described as the ‘Carpenter’s Shop’. He … designed it to be constructed from flints and bricks, with window relics salvaged from the earlier house. Then, to amuse or instruct his patron, Fitz Foy, timbers were tacked onto its walls to represent pediments, columns and entablatures, and so to mock the theories of the trendy Abbé Laugier who had claimed in his Essai sur l’architecture that the origins of classicism lay in the post-and-lintel structure of the primaeval wooden hut and that, therefore, to use these merely as decorative motifs was a sin.'

Record last edited

Feb 26 2016 4:59PM