Hindhead Court, including south terrace, steps and sunken garden

Summary

A country house in picturesque Tudor Revival style with Arts and Crafts influences, built 1914-1915 for John Benjamin Body. The architect was John Henry Howard and the builders were Chapman, Lowry and Puttick of Grayshott. The building was sold to the Grove School in 1953, and from 1995 to 2023 formed part of the Royal Junior School.

Reasons for Designation

Hindhead Court, completed in 1915, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* as a skilfully designed and richly detailed Tudor Revival house, produced by a local architect successfully employing the architectural language of the Arts and Crafts Movement on a grand scale with strong, regional distinctiveness;
* for the quality and visual complexity of the composition and elevational treatments, with multiple gables and jetties;
* for the consistently high quality of its materials and craftsmanship, including handmade brick, oak timber framing, and decorative panelling and plasterwork;
* for the high degree of survival of the original plan-form and interior decorative schemes to the principal rooms, particularly the ground-floor rooms which have a mixture of Jacobethan and Classical treatments.

Historic interest:

* as a well-executed and little-altered example of an early C20 Tudor Revival house designed on a grand scale, particularly familiar to the county of Surrey, which illustrates the lifestyle and sensibilities of wealthy homeowners in this period.

History

The village of Hindhead and the surrounding woodland occupies the high ground on the south side of the Devil’s Punch Bowl. The name Hindhead was first attested in 1571 and derives from the old English ‘Hyndehead’, meaning a hill frequented by female deer. The site to the west of Hazel Grove on which Hindhead Court now stands is shown on C19 maps as a managed copse, presumably of hazel trees. Hazel provided raw materials for a variety of uses such as timber for sheep hurdles and charcoal for the early iron industry. In 1884 Professor John Tyndall built a house for himself in Hindhead (originally called Tyndalls, now Hindhead House; NHLE: 1244173; Grade II) and declared the local air as pure as that of the Swiss Alps, which encouraged an influx of academic and literary people who built villas on Hindhead’s healthy slopes. Notable residents included Sir Robert Hunter (founding member of the National Trust), Sir Jonathan Hutchinson (surgeon and founder of the Haslemere Educational Museum), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Hindhead Court was designed in 1914 by local architect John Henry Howard. It was built for John Benjamin Body (1867-1940), a civil engineer and inventor who had made a fortune finding oil in Mexico in about 1908. After training in London and serving as an assistant engineer under Sir Joseph Bazalgette, Body moved to Mexico where he worked as a civil engineer for the firm S Pearson and Sons, which had recently secured an £11million construction contract for Mexico City’s Grand Canal. Body worked as a managing director with company owner Weetman Dickinson Pearson (later Lord Cowdray) for the rest of his life and was responsible for the entire Mexican site of Pearson’s affairs. Pearson began prospecting for oil in Mexico in 1901. Body’s grandson reports that his grandfather spotted an oily substance on the surface of a lake whilst out riding and suggested drilling there, which resulted in a major discovery of oil and the formation in 1909 of the Compañía Mexicana de Petróleo El Águila (Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company).

Hindhead Court was completed in 1915 at a cost of around £100,000. The builders were the Haslemere firm Chapman Lowry and Puttick, and the interiors were furnished by Howard and Sons (no relation to the architect), who commissioned Bedford Lemere to photograph the completed house in 1916. Body invited Bedford Lemere to take more photographs of the exterior in 1921; one of the resulting images indicates that within a few years of the house being completed, the secondary entrance to the north elevation leading into the study had been replaced with a bay window with a hipped roof. The grounds of the house were laid out with various landscape features: a raised and paved terrace spanning the south elevation, a sunken garden to the south-east, with a rose garden and brick pergola beyond, a croquet lawn to the south and an Alpine rock garden with a stream to the south-west.

The house remained in the Body family until 1952 when it was sold to the Grove School. Mary Body (nee Hamer; wife of John Body) had been friendly with the outgoing headmistress, Miss E M Fletcher, and knew the house would be well looked after by the school. The Grove School was founded as a private school in Nottingham by Mrs Lacey, who moved it to Highgate in 1891. Her daughter, Miss Mary R Lacey, took over in 1894 and served as the school’s headmistress until 1924. She had been a pioneer woman at Oxford University, reading history before women were formally permitted to take degrees, and has been described as an innovator in education for girls. She introduced individual, self-selected timetables for pupils and encouraged personal freedom and self-discipline to achieve academic success. The school provided education and boarding for girls aged five upwards through junior and senior school. In 1928, owing to the expansion of London and changes in Highgate, the school was moved to Hindhead by its new headmistress, Miss E M Fletcher. The school took on High Pitfold, a house of 1887 by F W Waller, located to the south-west of Hindhead Court. High Pitfold was renamed The Grove and survives as part of a care home on the site. Once the school took on Hindhead Court in 1955, The Grove was given entirely over to classrooms whilst Hindhead Court provided accommodation and dining facilities for around 80 boarders. There was further expansion in 1962 with the purchase of Ardquin, an early C20 half-timbered house located at the south-east corner of the site, and the construction of Little Court, a bungalow serving as accommodation for the headmistress. A small weather-boarded summerhouse to the west of Hindhead Court is also thought to date from the mid-C20. In 1995, The Grove School merged with the Royal Naval School to form the Royal Junior School, who occupied the site until 2023.

During its lifetime as a school building, Hindhead Court underwent some alterations, notably to the upper floors of the principal house where some rooms were subdivided to provide dormitories and additional bathrooms were installed. The roof of the winter garden was originally fully glazed but is now covered with wooden shingles and has a modern suspended ceiling inside; it is unclear whether or not the original glazing survives beneath the shingles. A single-storey, flat-roofed extension was added to the east elevation of the service wing to provide additional kitchen space.

John Henry Howard (1870-1940) inherited knowledge of traditional joinery from his father, and initially began business as a builder in Guildford. In 1893 he was appointed superintendent of the first sewage works in Haslemere, and by 1911 he became architect and surveyor to Hambledon Rural District Council. In 1913 he left the local authority to focus on private architectural work and estate management; Hindhead Court was among his earliest commissions. By 1918 he had taken on Lythe Hill Farm, Chiddingfold, a C15 Wealden-type farmhouse which Howard extended (NHLE: 1277848; Grade II*), and in 1925 he added a wing to Oak Hall, Haslemere (NHLE: 1393631; Grade II).

Details

Former country house, latterly a school, built from 1914 to 1915 to the design of architect John Henry Howard in Tudor Revival style for John Benjamin Body. Converted for the Grove School in 1953 and from 1995 to 2023 formed part of the Royal Junior School.

MATERIALS: the principal building is of oak timber-frame construction with red and dark grey brick nogging and some sections of hung, terracotta tiles. The roofs are covered with clay tiles. The service wing is of red brick construction and the roof is also covered with slates. The roof of the winter garden, originally glazed, is now covered with wooden shingles.

PLAN: the principal building is approximately orientated on a north-west to south-east axis, with the service wing projecting north-east from the east side of the house, and the winter garden projecting from the west end. For the purposes of this description, the south-west elevation is described as the south elevation, the north-east the north, and so forth. The house has an axial corridor running west-east to each floor, with rooms either side. On the ground floor this corridor opens out into a central hall, which is the largest room and overlooks the south terrace and lawn. The other principal ground-floor rooms include a drawing room, billiard room, study and dining room. The service wing has north-south corridors running with rooms to the east, on both the ground and first floors. A cellar occupies the south-east corner of the building.

EXTERIOR: the principal house is of two full storeys plus an attic storey. The service wing is of two storeys with some single-storey extensions, whilst the winter garden is of one and a half storeys. At ground-floor level, the house is of cavity wall construction with a plinth of red and dark grey brick laid in English bond providing sufficient rigidity and width to support the structural frame of green oak. The upper floors have brick nogging laid in a variety of bonds between the exposed timbers, and some sections of hung tiles. The gabled roofs are covered with clay tiles. The house has seven tall chimney stacks of brick, which are each made up of a cluster of octagonal-section shafts with oversailing corbel courses to the top.

The south elevation of the principal house, overlooking the gardens, is seven bays wide, its compositional symmetry interrupted only by slightly different arrangements of curved wind braces to the two widest, outer bays, which have broad gables and timber bargeboards. The central bay has a canted oriel window to the first floor, which has a turret-like roof and is carried on broad oak posts to form an open porch over the south terrace. At opposite ends of this porch, laid in the third course of bricks above the terrace paving, are a pair of foundation stones bearing the initials of John Benjamin Body’s two children: John Benjamin Weetman Body and Beatrice Millicent Body. The oak timber frame is expressed around this central porch and across the first-floor level as well as the attic level of the flanking gable ends, with brick nogging variously laid in herringbone, diagonal and vertical patterns. Fenestration comprises leaded, metal casement windows in the style of Henry Hope & Sons, set in mullioned and transomed timber frames, with raking dormers to the inner bays at attic level. The ground-floor windows also have projecting sills of terracotta tiles.

The north elevation is less symmetrical, giving the impression of a building that has been altered and extended over time. The central bay projects at first-floor level, with a jettied gable above, and carried on oak posts and moulded brackets forming a semi-open porch with a keyed Tudor archway. Originally above this arch was an inscribed proverb that read: ‘EAST: WEST. O . HOME’S: BEST’, but this has since been covered over or removed. The central bay has expressed oak framing and red brick nogging mainly in herringbone bond. The other bays have English bond brickwork to the ground floor and hung tiles to the upper levels. The two outer bays are broad gables with bargeboards as on the south elevation, but project forward and are jettied out slightly at attic level.

The fenestration is similar to that of the south elevation. The ground-floor window to the west of the porch is set in a springing arch of two rows of header bricks. There are raking dormers to the roof either side of the central gable. The east bay has a bay window with a tiled roof to the ground floor, which by 1921 had replaced an original doorway into the study.

The winter garden projects from the west elevation, with glazed gable ends over a brick plinth facing west and south; the north elevation is of brick with single-storey brick extensions. Along the east-west ridge of the roof is a glazed roof lantern with a pitched roof. All the roof slopes of the winter garden were originally glazed but are now covered with shingles. The upper parts of the west elevation of the principal house rise above the winter garden; at attic level there is a pair of tiled gables flanked by tall chimney stacks.

The east elevation of the house has another pair of tiled gables partly obscured by two-and-a-half storey extension possibly intended to look like a later addition. This extension is timber-framed with brick nogging and has a dual-pitched roof. Extending from this end of the house is the service wing, which is of two storeys. The external walls are of red brick laid in English bond and support a hipped, tiled roof with two rectangular chimney stacks of brick, with oversailing corbel courses. The windows are mostly three or four-light leaded casements; the ground-floor window openings have springing arches of two rows of header bricks, while the first-floor windows have moulded cornices that break the roofline. An original, single-storey kitchen range to the east elevation has a hipped, tiled roof with a central ventilation lantern with a metal canopy. This was part of a passive ventilation system that induced the flow of air up through the building by wind blowing through the lantern and lowering the pressure at the bottom of the ventilation shaft.

INTERIOR: the ground-floor rooms of the principal house have well-preserved, Jacobethan interiors including original oak panelling up to picture rail level, with moulded cornices and decorative carving to the frieze in some places. In some of these rooms, finely-jointed ashlar blocks are visible above the oak panelling. The exceptions are the drawing room and the small room between the dining room and central hall. The former has Classical detailing: fluted pilasters to the walls, moulded timber panelling to dado rail level and a decorative, moulded plaster ceiling and frieze. This frieze has a date of 1915 incorporated over the fireplace, which retains the original wooden mantelpiece and moulded stone surround, although the grate has been covered over and the fireplace itself appears to have later tiles. The small room between the central hall and the dining room is carpeted with plain walls, but has an original decorative plaster ceiling, an oak fire surround, a built-in oak sideboard and panelling beneath the window.

The other principal, ground-floor rooms have Tudor-style fireplaces and exposed, oak beams to the ceilings. The entrance hall has a stone fireplace with a moulded hood supported by clusters of classical columns. In the billiard room, there is a wide, panelled inglenook with a herringbone brick floor and a Tudor arch of stone over the brick fireplace with a finely-carved oak surround and mantelpiece. A similar, but smaller fireplace is located in the inglenook of the central hall, with floral decoration to the flanking pilasters and carved faces to the brackets supporting the heavily-decorated over-mantel. This inglenook was originally largely open to the rest of the central hall but has since been partitioned off with more oak panelling and a door; the span of the original opening is legible due to the projecting wooden lintel with moulded cornice above.

The study has another Tudor fireplace of stone with an oak surround that integrates with the original oak panelling, built-in cupboards and shelving. This room also has a decorative plaster ceiling instead of oak beams. The dining room has a similar fireplace and embossed, Jeffrey and Company wallpaper to the frieze. This particular wallpaper pattern was introduced in the late C19 and does not appear in the 1916 Bedford Lemere photographs of the dining room, although it was likely installed soon after that date. The dining room has a modern partition across one side to incorporate a washroom.

The ground floor of the house originally had parquet flooring throughout. This is still visible in the central hall inglenook and the dining room. In other rooms, a new timber floor has been laid on top (or carpet in the case of the study), but the original parquet may survive in situ underneath. The original tiled floor of the winter garden survives underneath the modern, terrazzo floor. The winter garden is fully glazed to its south and west sides; the north and east walls are of exposed brick. This space was originally open to the glazed roof but now has a modern, suspended ceiling.

The oak panelling continues up the principal staircase - which is of timber with column-on-vase balusters and moulded handrails and newel finials – and onto the first-floor landing, which has round-headed arches of oak springing from capitals at the top of the panelling, with carved decoration to the soffits. The first and second-floor rooms have simpler decoration, most retaining original timber fire-surrounds, moulded cornices and skirting, and some original built-in cupboards. Some of the rooms on these floors appear to have been subdivided during the conversion to school dormitories, and there are additional bathroom facilities at the west end of both floors.

Throughout the house, most of the cast-iron radiators, panelled doors, and bronze door and window furniture also survive; the lyre-shaped backplates to the window catches are similar to those designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The service wing interiors also survive generally well with some original fireplaces and moulded picture rails. The kitchens have been subject to various alterations including a modern extension, but it retains some built-in cupboards and shelving and a walk-in cold store with a heavy-duty metal door. The large dumb waiter at the north end of the service wing corridor also survives. The servants’ staircase features simple timber panelling and stick balusters.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: the original stone terrace spanning the width of the south elevation survives, with steps and ramps descending to the lawn, and paths wrapping around the winter garden to the west and leading east to the sunken garden. This garden survives largely intact, with crazy paving, retaining rubble walls, a linear pool or rill lined with stone and an ornamental bust to the centre, and a curved, stone bench integrated into the east wall.

Sources

Books and journals
O'Brien, C, Nairn, I, Cherry, B, Buildings of England: Surrey, (2022), 461
Death of Mr J H Howard in West Sussex Gazette & South of England Advertiser, (1 February 1940), 3

Other
S Sullivan, Hindhead Court: Historic Building Record, prepared on behalf of the Society for the Arts and Crafts Movement in Surrey (2023)
Grove School Prospectuses of various dates

End of official list entry

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