Rousham House

Rousham House (also known as Rousham Park) is a country house at Rousham in Oxfordshire, England. The house, which has been continuously in the ownership of one family, was built circa 1635 and remodelled by William Kent in the 18th century in a free Gothic style. Further alterations were carried out in the 19th century.

The celebrated gardens are open to the public every day; the house is open by appointment.

In the 1630s Sir Robert Dormer bought the manor of Rousham. He immediately began construction of the present house but work was halted by the start of the English Civil War. The Dormers were a Royalist family and the house was attacked by Parliamentary soldiers.

In 1649 the estate was inherited by Robert Dormer's son, also Robert. He left the house much as his father had created it, only repairing the damage of the Civil War. However, he did more to restore the family fortunes by marrying twice, each time to an heiress. His second wife was the daughter of Sir Charles Cottrell, a high-ranking courtier of Charles II.

Colonel Robert Dormer-Cottrell, the grandson of the house's builder, inherited Rousham in 1719 and began the huge transformation of the gardens to its current appearance. Initially he employed Charles Bridgeman to lay out the gardens in the new and more naturalistic style that was becoming popular. Bridgeman's layout of the garden was completed circa 1737. Rousham was then inherited by the Colonel's brother, General James Dormer-Cottrell. He called in William Kent to further enhance and develop the garden that Bridgeman created. This Kent did with considerable success over the next four years. In 1741 Sir Clement Cottrell-Dormer inherited the estate.

At this time Kent also embellished the house itself, with crenellations and two wings containing a drawing room and a "delightful" library, according to Horace Walpole who said of Rousham in 1760 "it reinstated Kent with me; he has no where shewn so much taste". The interiors were altered a century later but the hall, the principal room of the house, has survived alteration by successive generations unchanged, and remains as completed in the 17th century. Kent's exterior work is today almost as built, but in 1876 the original octagonal paned glazing was replaced with innovative large sheets of plate glass, during a heavy-handed restoration of the house by the architect James Piers St Aubyn. The house contains fine collections of Jacobean and 18th-century furniture, paintings and statuary, all displayed in a domestic setting.

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