Heathcote, Ilkley

Heathcote is a Neoclassical style villa in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, England. Designed by architect Edwin Lutyens, it was his first comprehensive use of that style, making it the precursor of his later public buildings in Edwardian Baroque style and those of New Delhi. It was completed in 1908.

In December 2014 English Heritage designated it a Grade I listed building, raising it from the Grade II* designation which it received in 1979. In its new listing for Heathcote, English Heritage called it a "pivotal" building in Lutyens's career, and "an imaginative and inventive essay in Mannerism". The gardens are Grade II listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

In 1906, Lutyens was commissioned by John Thomas Hemingway (1857–1926), a wealthy self-made Bradford wool merchant, and his wife Emma Jane, to replace their existing villa, which was at the lower, southern end of a sloping site, 4 acres (1.6 ha) in extent. Lutyens was given a free rein in the design. He built the new villa at the top of the site, in a size and style intended to dominate the neighbouring villas. Lutyens had already mixed elements of classical architecture into his earlier, vernacular and Neo-Georgian designs, and his correspondence with Herbert Baker displayed a growing enthusiasm for classical architecture. Later, he acknowledged a stylistic debt at Heathcote to the 16th-century Italian architect Michele Sanmicheli. Lutyens has been criticised for using a grand style more suited to a public building than to the Hemingways' dwelling. Lutyens came to call his new style "Wrennaissance", after Christopher Wren.

The house is built of local ashlar: yellow Guiseley stone decorated with grey stone from Morley, with rustication on the ground floor and on the tall chimneys. The main features of the house and gardens are symmetrical around a north-south axis. English Heritage have identified a compositional influence from the 17th-century French architect François Mansart. The house has a three-storey central block, set back between two flanking two-storey pavilions to east and west, each with an additional one-storey outer wing. Each of these five components has a hip roof, made of red pantiles.

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