The Grange, Northington

The Grange is a 19th-century country house-mansion and English landscape park near Northington in Hampshire, England. It is currently owned by the Ashburton family. English Heritage have a guardianship deed on the Grade I listed building, with the gardens and monument's exterior open to the public. The house and gardens are also available to rent for parties and weddings. The Grange Park Opera company has staged opera at The Grange every Summer from 1998- to 2016. From June 2017 The Grange Festival will become the new resident opera company.

1662: Robert Henley bought the estate and a modest house known as The Grange. In 1665 he commissioned William Samwell to build an impressive four storey red brick residence to replace the house.

1764: Robert Henley, 1st Earl of Northington (1708–1772) commissioned Robert Adam to design a kitchen block and an entrance bridge. The same year he laid out a naturalistic English landscape park, including a lake and folly.

1787: The second Earl died childless and his sisters sold the house to the Drummond banking family.

1795: The Grange was leased to George, Prince of Wales as a hunting lodge with over 400 deer in the park

In 1804, Henry Drummond commissioned his friend the architect William Wilkins to transform his brick house into a neoclassical Ancient Greek temple. Wilkins, a promising young architect and antiquary, had been much influenced by his recent travels to Greece and Asia Minor. The massive Doric portico is a copy of the Theseion in Athens and the side elevations imitate the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus. Whilst commonly claimed to be the earliest Greek Revival style house in Europe, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, for instance, was using the primitive Greek Doric at Hammerwood Park in 1792. The transformation was largely external - the old house was literally wrapped in Roman cement, a very hard render made from ground flint. This is when the podium visible today was built. What had been ground floor rooms became basement rooms and the main reception rooms which had been on the piano nobile were now at the same level as the podium. The windows of servants’ rooms on the uppermost storey were covered by the entablature of the temple facade, and is partly why it was necessary to extend the house. As at Hammerwood, the giant Doric portico is echoed by a single storey portico behind so as to provide an enhanced perspective when viewed from the hill opposite beyond the lake in the style of the Picturesque.

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