Horwood House
De Vere Horwood Estate lies 0.5-mile (0.80 km) south east of the village of Little Horwood in Buckinghamshire. This mansion is a comparatively modern house, built in 1911, the date being embossed into the gutter hopper-heads. Today it is a conference and training venue, owned and operated by Principal Hotel Company
It was built for Frederick Arthur Denny (who had made his fortune in pork and bacon) and designed in the William & Mary style by the architect Detmar Blow and the interior designer Billerey. It is built on the site of the former Old Horwood, a 300-year-old farmhouse previously known as Rectory House. Old Horwood was a building of late sixteenth-century construction, consisting of two storeys and an attic, with walls of timber and brick, which a Colonel Daucy occupied for a period and local folklore suggests that his ghost haunts the present house. It was extended in the later seventeenth century, and enlarged in the nineteenth century. When the estate was purchased by Denny it consisted of 482 acres (1.95 km2), two farms, eleven cottages, the village hall, parkland and woods. The purchase of the estate made the owner the Lay Rector or patron of St Nicholas' church, Little Horwood. (In the Church of England, the legal right to appoint or recommend a parish priest is called an advowson, and its possessor is known as a patron.)
The construction of the house was contracted to Cubitts who had built much of the Grosvenor Estate in Belgravia. The brief given by Frederick Denny was that the house should be reasonably imposing but compact enough to be comfortable and it was supposed to be a copy of a house that he had seen in the West Country. The house had fourteen bedrooms, five bathrooms and there were nine servants' bedrooms in the West wing of the house, which adjoined the Norfolk-thatched stable yard, in which were housed eight top-class hunters. The thatch was laid by the brothers Farnham, famous thatchers of Rockland St. Mary. The horses were kept as it was the Denny’s main sport and even the son and daughters took part. The house is of old russety bricks, which were imported from the Netherlands and old tiles were used for the gabled roof giving an appearance of a much older building than it was. It is believed that some fireplaces and wood-work too were recovered from other houses. At the rear of the house is a ha-ha which allows a panoramic view from the house but keeps out grazing cattle and wildlife. The house is symmetrical in layout and was featured in Country Life (10 November 1923); the article approved of the house, even though neither Mr. nor Mrs. Denny were in residence.
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