Heythrop Park

Heythrop Park is an early 18th-century country house 1 mile (1.6 km) southeast of Heythrop in Oxfordshire. It was designed by the architect Thomas Archer in the Baroque style for Charles Talbot, 1st Duke of Shrewsbury. A fire in 1831 destroyed the original interior. From 1922 until 1999 Heythrop housed first a Jesuit tertiary education college, and later a training establishment. The house is now the main building of the Heythrop Park Hotel, Golf & Country Club.

Heythrop Park was designed by the architect Thomas Archer for Charles Talbot, 1st Duke of Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury had travelled in Italy on an extensive Grand Tour, between 1700 and 1705. Apparently the duke had already decided to build in 1700, before he left for Italy, because of his failure to buy Cornbury Park near Charlbury, Oxfordshire. Cornbury was a regular classical house designed by Inigo Jones' mason, Nicholas Stone, which had been brought up to date for the Earl of Clarendon more recently by Hugh May; Shrewsbury's disappointment evinces the enthusiasm for classical architecture that he had acquired before he left England. Modern architecture in Italy had evolved into its Baroque form, a style quite unknown in England. The travelling duke was quickly won over: in Rome, Shrewsbury visited the villa of Domenico de' Rossi in 1702, to "lay aside some prints" by the architectural engraver of the Studio di architettura civile di Roma, full of designs by Borromini and Bernini. In 1704 Shrewsbury obtained a plan for a house from Paolo Falconieri. On his return to England, apparently possessing at least Rossi's first volume (of 1702), Shrewsbury called upon Archer to create a modern Italian palazzo set in the Oxfordshire countryside. At this time, Archer was one of the few English architects to have studied in Italy and become conversant with the Baroque forms of architecture, but many of the details of Heythrop were adapted from Roman precedents through engravings in Rossi's publication, though none was directly imitated.

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