VAULTED HISTORY
Ashby Manor House has a venerable past stretching back to the Domesday Book and encompassing the Gunpowder Plot, but its new owners have given it a thoroughly modern sensibility
It was in the early 1990s when, on a whim, Ivor Guest, the future Viscount Wimborne, decided to visit Ashby Manor House in rural Northamptonshire, the ancestral home his father had sold off 15 years earlier. With his girlfriend Susie Bick (who was later to marry Nick Cave and found the acclaimed label the Vampire’s Wife), he peered through the gates at the honey-coloured hall. A passing groundsman recognised him from his childhood, and informed him that the estate had just been put up for sale.
Guest, a music producer, promptly bought back the family seat and spent several years meticulously restoring this mediaeval jewel: exposing the exquisite plasterwork ceilings that had been covered over, whitewashing the 1960s orange walls and stripping out built-in cabinetry. He installed a minimalist kitchen of Bath stone and walnut worktops at one end of the soaring Stone Hall, and pared-back, Japanese-style pine bathrooms upstairs. And when he decided to move on, his cousin Henry Guest – who had long loved Ashby and had got married there to his Australian wife Nova – snapped up the property, settling in with their young children in 2015.
Under their careful, creative watch, and thanks in no small part to Nova’s light touch and relaxed style, the house has been transformed into a family home that embraces both the past and the present. Architecturally, Ashby showcases a wonderful mixture of styles: it was mentioned in the Domesday Book, but the earliest traceable elements today are late mediaeval and early Tudor, including a timber-framed gatehouse where Robert Catesby, whose family lived here for more than 200 years, co-hatched the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. (He chose not to use the main house so as to avoid implicating his mother, who lived there.) The south façade, complete with Dutch gables, was started in the early 17th century and was accessorised, as per Edwardian fashions, with a Tudor wing brought over in its entirety from Ipswich in the early 20th century. At the same time, the manor’s crowning glory – the spectacular neo-jacobean extensions and interiors – were created by Edwin Lutyens.
‘Ivor’s mantra was always, “What would Lutyens want?”’ Nova says as she whisks me around the soaring, almost monastic halls. ‘And he did such a beautiful job of sorting the place out, yet he never really fully unpacked! I used to long to come in and put up his Canalettos.’
Once the place was theirs, Nova set to work breathing life and colour into the spaces. Apart from sprucing
up a Parsons Green flat, she had never decorated a house before, so she went on instinct and took her time, with encouragement from friends and experts. These included the dealer James Mcwhirter (‘the unsung hero of the antiques world’) and Henrietta Courtauld of the Land Gardeners, who lives nearby at the similarly Jacobean Wardington Manor, and is helping the Guests revive the walled garden. Equally helpful was Guy Tobin, the head of furniture at Rose Uniacke, whose chic sofas were some of the first things Nova brought in. Crucially, the white-linen covers are washable, for this modern chatelaine is practical and not precious: children, dogs and, indeed, dinner guests are encouraged to run riot. ‘We’re fairly bomb-proof – I really wanted to have a sense of fun in this house,’ she says. ‘In old magazine shoots, the rooms are incredibly lavish – but there’s nowhere to sit, so they don’t actually look comfortable. I love putting armchairs, lamps and piles of good books everywhere.’
All of the spaces, no matter how historic, have been equipped for everyday use. The games-room, lined with 17th-century panelling, contains a Lego shrine and towers of DVDS; the south-facing, light-filled Lutyens hall, with its exquisite arched ceiling, is where we have fish pie for lunch. Upstairs, simplicity reigns supreme: the Oak Bedroom’s windows have been left curtain-free and a Regency sofa re-upholstered in plain white calico cotton. In the attic is a vast dressing-room, which Nova is looking forward to making use of, once Grace Jones, another of Ivor’s former flames, has picked up her tour-costume archive, currently housed in the built-in wardrobes.
Outside, the elegant Lutyensdesigned garden is thriving, fruit-trees are laden with apples and the Guests have planted 50 climbing roses to soften the manor’s silhouette. There’s also a whole other house tacked onto one end of it, not to mention dovecotes, a thatched barn that needs restoring and an old pump house ripe for conversion into a cottage. ‘And I need to work out what to do with this Seventies sauna down in the cellar,’ says Nova with a sigh. ‘It could be an amazing space, but at the moment it’s more akin to a marble porn room.’ Now what exactly would Lutyens have made of that? Ashby Manor House (www.ashbymanor house.com) is available for private hire.