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.
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