Wednesday 6 February 2019

The Rebirth of an English Country House: St. Giles House by Earl Of Shaftsbury (Author), Tim Knox (Author) VIDEO:Lord Shaftesbury's Extensive Estate Restoration


The Rebirth of an English Country House: St. Giles House
by Earl Of Shaftsbury (Author), Tim Knox (Author)


The 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, 39-year-old Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, invites the reader into the house that his family has called home since the fifteenth century. In recent years, his award-winning restoration has brought the house back to life, transforming exquisite spaces that honour the past while being suited to twenty-first-century living. English country-house splendour, through the hands of some of the world s top artisans and craftspeople, returns to the house in the form of re-created wallpapers, customized paints, revived furniture from the Georgian and Victorian periods, reworked antique Brussels tapestries, restored plasterwork and textiles, and a complete overhaul of the landscape, with its sunken garden, woodlands, avenue of beeches, lake, and shell-encrusted grotto. With stories of noteworthy architecture, beautiful interiors, and centuries of a single family s involvement in British and world history, this book will appeal to devotees of country living, the aristocratic life, historic houses, and English interior design.

Above: Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, and his wife, Dinah. Top: The exterior of St. Giles House.
Photo: Juston Barton

In 2012, Nicholas Edmund Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, and his wife became the first people to live in St Giles House, Dorset, since the death of his great-grandfather in 1961. The Grade I listed building had been the family home since the 1400’s, but like many English country houses, it fell into disrepair following World War II. Lord Shaftesbury’s talk will explain his sudden inheritance, as well as describe his personal trials and tribulations, and eventual successes with the renaissance of St. Giles. He will show dramatic before-and-after photos, from the interiors to the grounds and gardens, which offer a front row seat into the house’s dramatic transformations. The result is a testament to his resilience to honor his family’s past while embracing 21st century living.




The 12th Earl of Shaftesbury Relays a Family's History Through Its House
In a new book, the earl reminisces on St. Giles House and the drama that unfolded within it

By Mitchell Owens
December 12, 2018
The 12th Earl of Shaftesbury Relays a Family's History Through Its House

“Houses are exactly like gardens,” Nick Shaftesburytold AD PRO recently. “You leave a garden for summer or six months, and it’s just gone wild. A house is the same: left to its own devices, it unravels so quickly without humans stroking, caressing, tending, fixing, and constantly keeping the thing going.” In his case, the “thing” is St. Giles House, the redbrick seat of the Ashley-Cooper family for nearly 400 years, and home to the Manhattan DJ (he was then known as Nick AC) turned 12th earl of Shaftesbury. It’s also the subject of an engaging, intimate, and surprisingly honest book, freshly published by Rizzoli: The Rebirth of an English Country House: St Giles House ($55).

Written by Shaftesbury and Tim Knox (now the curator of the Royal Collection) and photographed by Justin Barton, The Rebirth of an English Country House traces the trajectory of St. Giles, located near the Dorset village of Wimborne St. Giles, from splendor to dilapidation and nearly back again. (More on that strategic “nearly” in a few moments.) That narrative is interwoven with the brutal 2004 murder of Shaftesbury’s flamboyant father, the 10th earl, by his third wife’s brother, and the death, six months later, of his 27-year-old accountant brother, the 11th earl, of a heart attack during a holiday in New York. Three years after that, Shaftesbury broke his back in a riding accident. (He has since healed and is now a marathon runner and ambassador for Wings of Life, an Austrian-based international spinal-cord research foundation.) These episodes upended the present earl’s life, personally and professionally, and thus might have understandably been entirely skirted in the new book, but Shaftesbury and his family agreed that enough time had passed. In any case, it’s not as if the story of St. Giles could be told without them.

“My siblings and my mother were affected by those events as much as I was, but they have been really supportive, and I shared with them what I had written, and they were comfortable with it,” says the 39-year-old, sleeve-tattooed aristocrat, who married veterinary surgeon Dinah Streifeneder in 2010 and has three children, Anthony, Viva, and Zara. “Each of us has dealt with it in our own way,” he continues. “Sometimes you see tabloid articles that are kind of distressing, and other times you give interviews, but some of them have been lovely, actually." Ultimately, he says, "the book was cathartic.”
The Rizzoli deal also gave Shaftesbury a singular opportunity to honor his late father’s own youthful efforts in preserving St. Giles, which hadn’t been occupied since the 1940s. “It’s easy for people to focus on a man who had spiraled out of control, and mist over all the years he had put into his family and into the house,” he explains. “It’s also nice to highlight my brother’s contributions. What we’ve done is finish off work that had been started off many years before.”

The 10th Lord Shaftesbury started the ball rolling in the early 1970s by demolishing Victorian additions that had transformed the 1650–51 house, constructed for the first earl, into a castellated, elephantine sprawl, picturesque in silhouette but with unwieldy results. “Unfortunately, the Victorians did that a lot,” explains the present earl, who larded the stylishly produced book with family photographs and staggering "before" shots (think collapsed ceilings and black mold). “We live in an era where you can’t touch anything or make any changes, but my father’s removals made the house more practical and more aesthetically pleasing," he opines.

The biggest contribution was the 10th earl’s brilliant decision to remove the disintegrating stucco that had been slathered on the exterior in Victorian days—it was fashionable at the time—to expose the original 17th-century brick. (He also got rid of a disfiguring 19th-century tower.) Says Shaftesbury, “The result is a charming, softer house.” Still, the restoration stalled because of money issues, and the family continued to live at another Ashley-Cooper property. Then came 1999, the first of several anni horribiles that came in swift succession. The 10th earl, shattered by the death of his adored mother, relocated to the South of France, divorced his Swedish second wife (the present earl’s mother), and succumbed to drugs, alcohol, and sketchy romances.

Though St. Giles had returned to its original form under the 10th earl’s ministrations, the house, still shuttered and crumbling, eventually ended up on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk list. Roofs leaked so badly that buckets were positioned all over the house; windows rarely kept out the elements; giant holes allowed one to peer into the basement; and all manner of disintegration abounded. “Dry rot is a particularly sinister phrase, isn’t it?” Shaftesbury says. “It’s even more sinister in real life.” In 2015, though, he and his wife proudly accepted the Historic Houses Association and Sotheby’s Restoration Award for their enthusiastic efforts in turning back St. Giles’ decline in just five years. They also settled into a sprightly, easygoing apartment in the south wing (it’s featured in the book, too) and revitalized the 5,500-acre estate as a business—farming its fields, raising cattle for dairy and beef, running commercial partridge and pheasant shoots, and renting out portions of the house and outbuildings for weddings and the like. The book also generously highlights the works of the artisans and craftspeople who have helped the Shaftesburys in the restoration, which ranged from the reproduction of antique wallpapers to the restoration of the park and its grottoes, as well as the restoration grants and other funding that helped bring St. Giles back to life.

Curiously, though, it’s what the Shaftesburys haven’t done at St Giles that rivets the visitor’s eye. The Great Dining Room, which is pictured on the book’s cover, is still missing a goodly portion of the 18th-century paneling, revealing the underlying brick walls in full view. (Yes, dry rot was the culprit.) As a result, an earlier era’s doors and windows, sealed up when the room was remodeled in the 1700s, are plainly visible—and it was the Shaftesburys’ inspired idea not to re-create the grand space as a period piece. “When you try something different, it’s nice when people don’t always get it. Sometimes they ask, ‘When are you going to finish?’ Or ‘Did you really take off all the paneling?’” Shaftesbury explains. “What I love about that space is that your imagination is allowed to run wild. A lot of houses are grand and beautiful but there’s often no surprise or thought-provoking element. It’s lovely to feel that we can contribute something to the house and not be entirely slavish to what happened before.”

Enraptured by the story that Nick Shaftesbury tells in The Rebirth of an English Country House? Then get thee to South Carolina’s Charleston Antiques Show: On March 16, 2019, the earl will be talking about the revival of St. Giles. The trip to America is also a bit of a homecoming—the first earl, the man who built St. Giles, was one of the Carolina colony’s original lords proprietor, and namesake of the state's Ashley and Cooper rivers. Whether his DJ descendant spins any discs, though, is anybody’s guess.




No comments: