Country house in Tabley Inferior, Cheshire, England
Tabley House is an English country house in Tabley Inferior (Nether Tabley), some to the west of the town of Knutsford, Cheshire. The house is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building. It was built between 1761 and 1769 for Sir Peter Byrne Leicester, to replace the nearby Tabley Old Hall, and was designed by John Carr. The Tabley House Collection exists as an exhibition showcased by the University of Manchester.
In the early part of the 19th century, three of Carr's rooms on the west side of the house were converted to form a single room, the gallery. After Sir Peter's death, the house was re-orientated and the main entrance moved from the south to the north front. The house and estate continued to be held by the Leicester family until the death of Lt. Col. John Leicester Warren in 1975.
Under the terms of his will the house, contents and estate were offered to the National Trust, which declined the offer. The house was then acquired under the terms of the will by the Victoria University of Manchester, and the house was used as a school. Since 1988 its lease has been held by a healthcare company. The estate surrounding the house was sold in 2007 to the Crown Estate.
The house is symmetrical and designed in Palladian style. It is constructed in brick with stone dressings, with a large sandstone portico on the south front. On the east and west sides of the main house are pavilion wings connected to the house by curved corridors. To the west of the house is St Peter's Church, also listed Grade I, which was moved from a position adjacent to Tabley Old Hall to its present site in 1927. In the grounds are other listed buildings, including the ruins of the Old Hall.
As of 2012 the ground and top floors of the main house, together with the adjacent wings, are used as accommodation for the elderly. The reception rooms of the first floor are open to the public at advertised times, and are entered by the original stairway on the south front; they contain paintings and furniture collected by the Leicester family. Some items in the collection had formerly been displayed on this floor, whilst others were moved from elsewhere in the house. The first floor may also be hired for weddings, meetings, and conferences. It is managed by a trust, which is supported by a group of Friends and by volunteers.
History.
Old Hall.
The original house was built on an island in Nether Tabley Mere, known as the Moat, in about 1380 by John de Leycester. The house contained a Great Hall with a large central arch formed by two massive cruck beams, which were carved to imitate Gothic stonework. During the 16th century Adam de Leycester made alterations to the hall, and built a half-timbered gatehouse to the bridge crossing the mere. Peter Leycester (1588–1647) installed an ornate chimneypiece dated 1619 in the Great Hall.
In 1671 his son, the historian Sir Peter Leycester, 1st Baronet (1614–78), enlarged the house, adding a staircase and an upper storey. He arranged for the exterior to be encased in brick in Jacobean style, with a mixture of mullioned and round windows, and a porch with statues of lions. In 1674 Sir Peter replaced the chapel adjacent to the hall, designed in a mixture of Gothic and Jacobean styles, and a tower was added to the chapel in 1724.
After the new house was built in the 1760s, the Old Hall continued to be furnished, and the chapel was used for family worship. But in 1927 part of the hall collapsed because of subsidence resulting from the extraction of brine nearby. The building was abandoned, and is now a ruin. The chapel (now known as St Peter's Church) was demolished and rebuilt near to the west front of the new house. The ornate chimneypiece was moved and reinstalled in the Old Hall Room on the west side of the house.
Present house.
The present house was built by Sir Peter Byrne Leicester. He inherited the estate through his mother's line on the death of his grandfather in 1742, at which time he was aged 10. At this time his name was Peter Byrne, and the name of Leicester was added by an Act of Parliament in 1744. One of the requirements of his inheritance was to keep the Old Hall in good condition, but Sir Peter considered it to be "old and not commodious". When he came of age in 1753 he decided to build a new house to replace the Old Hall. The provisions of his grandfather's will made it difficult for him to build a new house outside the parish of Nether Tabley, therefore Sir Peter decided to build it nearby in the estate, higher on the ground sloping down to the Moat. He appointed John Carr of York as architect; building began in 1761 and was completed in about 1769.
Carr designed the house in Palladian style, even though by the 1760s this style was becoming less fashionable. His design consisted of a rectangular building in three storeys, with a projecting portico on the south front, and two pavilions on each side, which were set back and approached by curved corridors. On each side of the portico was a curved stairway leading to the main middle floor, the "piano nobile". As the house was originally planned, it had a central staircase, with three rooms on the south front. The middle of these rooms was the entrance hall, to the west of it was the drawing room, and to the east was the dining room. Behind the drawing room was the library, and behind the dining room was a room known as the common parlour. Across the back of the house, on this floor, there were two bedrooms and three dressing rooms. The western pavilion contained the servants' bedrooms, and in the eastern pavilion was the kitchen. The interior of the house contained craftsmanship of a high quality. The plasterwork was created by Thomas Oliver of Warrington, the woodcarving of the doorcases and staircase was by Mathew Bertram, assisted by Daniel Shillito. Much of the furniture was made by Gillow of Lancaster. Sir Peter also commissioned a number of paintings, which included full-length portraits of himself and his wife by Francis Cotes, and landscapes of the grounds and the halls by J. M. W. Turner and Richard Wilson amongst others.
An interest in paintings continued in the family's next generation. Sir John Fleming Leicester, the 1st Lord de Tabley, built a collection of modern British art that was hung in a gallery in his London house at Hill Street, Berkeley Square. Sir John has been described as "the first important patron of British art". In 1823 he offered his collection to Lord Liverpool to form the basis of the planned National Gallery, but the offer was declined. After his death in 1827 the best works were sold by auction and the remainder moved to Tabley, where most of them are today. Between 1808 and 1810 the three original rooms on the west side of the first floor of the house had been converted by Thomas Harrison into a single tripartite room to form a picture gallery. Further work was carried out in the room following this; Peter Cannon Brookes, the author of the 1991 guide to the house, concludes that the final appearance of the room "dates almost entirely from 1840–45".
After Sir John's death the house was structurally reorganised for George Warren, 2nd Baron de Tabley by Robert Curzon, a family friend and an "amateur architect". The house was re-orientated to move the front entrance to the north side of the house. The architecture of the north front had previously been "simple and dignified", but it was enhanced to make its appearance more impressive. The alterations included adding rustication to the bottom storey and around the central window, and quoins to the three projecting central bays. The arms of the 2nd baron were added to the previously blank pediment, and in 1915 a small porch was built over the new entrance. The south portico had become redundant, other than serving as an entrance to the garden. The new entrance led by way of a small lobby to a new staircase up to a new entrance hall on the first floor. A new dining room was created in the northeast corner.
The house and estate continued to be owned by the Leicester family until the death of Lt. Col. John Byrne Leicester Warren in 1975. The first request in his will was that the estate should if possible be taken into the care of the National Trust, but this was declined by the Trust. The executors then acted on Warren's second request, to pass the estate to a charitable institution, and thus it came into the care of the Victoria University of Manchester. By the time of Warren's death the manor of Nether Tabley, comprising the estate and the halls, had been owned by the Byrne-Leicester family for almost exactly 700 years. Col. Leicester-Warren used the house as a school from the late 1940s until 1984, after his death. In 1988 a 125-year lease of the house, the stables, and the associated buildings was sold by the university to Cygnet Health Care, on condition that the suite of rooms on the first floor of the house, and their contents, should be preserved. Between 1988 and 1990 the health care company carried out structural repairs to deal with damage caused by dry rot and the deathwatch beetle. The ground and top floors of the house, and the wings, have been converted into nursing accommodation, leaving the appearance of the exterior virtually unchanged. In 1990 the first floor was opened to the public under the care of the Tabley House Collection Trust. The original entrance by the stairway on the south front was re-instated for this purpose.
In 2007 the university sold the estate – but not the house – to the Crown Estate in a deal worth "over £35m". Its included 18 tenanted farms, 18 farmland lettings, 52 residential properties and 13 commercial leases generating a total rent roll of £500,000.
Architecture.
Tabley House was designated as a Grade I listed building on 5 March 1959. Its architectural style is Palladian, the only 18th-century Palladian country house in Cheshire. The house has three storeys; the bottom storey is constructed in rusticated stone, with the upper storeys in Flemish bond brick with stone dressings. A Doric frieze runs around the whole building below the eaves. The roofs are in green slate with lead flashings. The south front has nine bays, the central three bays projecting forward. On each side of the central projection is a semi-circular stairway leading to the middle floor. The stairway is built in rusticated stone and it has a moulded balustrade. From the top of the stairway a portico rises through the top two storeys. It consists of four columns in Doric style constructed from red Runcorn sandstone. Its tympanum contains the arms of Sir Peter Byrne Leicester and his wife, Catherine. All the windows in the ground floor are sashes with 3×2 panes and over each window there are splayed voussoirs. The central bay of the middle storey contains a doorway with an architrave and a segmental pediment carried on brackets. On each side of the door is a window with similar architraves and segmental pediments, but not carried on brackets. In the lateral three bays on each side are sash windows with 3×5 panes over which are architraves and triangular pediments. The top floor windows are also sashes, these having 3×3 panes, and architraves with scrolls at the top and bottom.
The north front is also symmetrical and is in seven bays, with the central three projecting slightly forwards. Over the bays is a pediment containing the arms of the 2nd Baron de Tabley and his wife Catherina. In the centre of the ground floor is a porch, on either side of which are two 3×2 sash windows, plus a narrow two-pane window. The middle floor has a central Venetian window surrounded by a rusticated stone arch. All the other windows on this floor are 3×5 sashes; those on each side of the central window have triangular pediments, while those in the lateral bays have horizontal architraves. The