CHARLES’S £10 MILLION FOLLY
He’s personally designed this grandiose dream home — but scornful architects say it will be a blot on the countryside
NoT for 200 years — not, in fact, since an earlier Prince of Wales nearly bankrupted himself building the madcap Brighton Pavilion — has there been anything quite so wonderfully bonkers. It’s the folly Prince Charles always wanted to live in, a grandiose £10million house of his own design, far from the public gaze in deepest rural Herefordshire.
Plans for the neo-classical dream home have been drawn up quietly over many years by the Prince — a sworn enemy of the ‘monstrous carbuncles’ of modern architecture.
For this Roman-style mini-palace based on a triumphal arch, the Prince and his architect have gone back 2,000 years for inspiration, creating a monument of which the emperors Nero and Augustus would be proud.
An empty plot at Harewood End, near Ross-on-Wye, awaits the construction of the house, to be built lavishly in local sandstone, and featuring classical figures adorning sculptured panels, ornate bronze windows, and a mighty pillared hall graced with a languidly curved staircase.
There are six big bedrooms and plenty of gracious rooms downstairs for entertaining, including a sitting room, dining room, library, boot-room, orangery, kitchens, and a vast drawing room boasting a bow frontage whose inspiration comes, oddly enough, not from ancient Rome but straight out of Buckingham Palace’s Music Room.
outside, there’s a handy restored stable block for staff accommodation, plus a private chapel where Charles can thank his Maker for his great good fortune.
The whole place sits on a 300-acre estate, close to the River Wye. And there is a ‘green’ theme running through the planned house — with solar panels on the roof for heating water, and an eco-friendly reed-bed sewage system.
For Charles, then, a little piece of paradise. But for the architectural profession? ‘This is less Harewood; more hare-brained,’ concludes John Glenday, editor of Britain’s oldest architecture magazine, Urban Realm.
‘A mockery,’ says the distinguished architectural commentator Douglas Murphy.
At first sight, it’s puzzling that Charles feels the need to add yet another sprawling home to his bulky property portfolio.
He already enjoys the cushioned comforts of his three main residences, Clarence House in London, Birkhall on the Balmoral estate and his beloved Highgrove in Gloucestershire. He can always stay at the palatial Dumfries House in Ayrshire after heading up a consortium to save it; a Welsh holiday home at Llwynywernod; two houses in Transylvania; and part-ownership of Camilla’s Wiltshire home.
‘Harewood? Hare-brained
more like’ Charles splashed out £45m on an
impulse buy ‘It’s a monument to delusions of
grandeur’
That’s quite apart from his rooms at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Sandringham: it’s not as if the Prince is short of a bed for the night.
But these are all places which Charles has either bought, or in which he is merely a ‘lodger’ — albeit a regal one with very secure life tenure.
And for a Prince who feels so strongly not only about architecture but also his own place in history, the chance to build a monument to his own design is unmissable.
Perhaps Charles, who celebrates his 67th birthday tomorrow, is beginning to think about how to leave a lasting legacy of his ideas on the landscape.
He’s had a bit of practice, designing the fire station on his pet housing development at Poundbury in Dorset (an urban extension to the county town of Dorchester, built on Duchy of Cornwall land) according to ‘architectural principles’ advocated by himself.
Though its workaday purpose is to house fire-engines and their crews, it looks, according to critic Justin McGuirk, editor of Icon magazine, ‘like a dumpy neo-classical Georgian palace with three garage doors attached.’
With waspish wit, referring to the Channel 4 soap opera set on a working -class Liverpool estate, he added: ‘The Parthenon meets Brookside.’
Undeterred by such barbs, Charles proudly put the plans for his dream home, drawn up by himself and celebrated architect Craig Hamilton, to Herefordshire County Council. The project was accepted, but only after the Duchy had been told to scale down its ambitions.
The Prince had first wanted a simply colossal pile, absurdly colonnaded and looking like the more typical British stately home — only for that to be turned down.
The house that was subsequently approved is destined for the site where once an 18th century stately home, Harewood Park, stood, just off the A49 between Ross-on-Wye and Hereford.
It fell into terminal disrepair and was finally demolished by the SAS, who used it for training exercises until blowing it up in 1959.
More recently, the spot was occupied by a modest red-brick bungalow whose inhabitants bred beagles used for vivisection in the once-magnificent walled garden.
Today, the bungalow has gone, as have the razor-wire fences that deterred animal-rights protestors, while the nearby 19th-century St Denis’s church and original stable block have been fully refurbished ready to welcome the new house and its royal creator.
At one stage, it was thought that the house might be built for Prince William and Kate as a country home. But they are happily ensconced in 10-bedroom Anmer Hall, a gift from the Queen, on the Royal estate at Sandringham. After a multi-million pound refurbishment programme, the Georgian house — with swimming pool and tennis court, close to many of their Norfolk-based friends — is the perfect family base.
It is difficult to see the Prince himself ever leaving his beloved Highgrove and the garden on which he has lavished such devotion.
So quite why Charles feels the need to plan this temple to himself, only our future king can answer.
But he has certainly not been keen to let people know of his ambition. The plans have lain undetected in an anonymous council record since they were first submitted in 2006.
Only a trawl through Herefordshire County Council’s records this week uncovered a nondescript file requesting the ‘erection of a replacement dwelling, garaging and associated landscaping’ on the Harewood Estate — which though strictly accurate, is a considerable understatement given the scale of the enterprise.
There appears to be no immediate hurry to get construction under way. Prince Charles’s office at the Duchy of Cornwall told me there are ‘no plans’ at present to go ahead with building, but adds, tantalisingly: ‘Never say never.’ So that could mean any time soon. However, it is possible that after the first flush of enthusiasm, the Prince has had a reality check.
He is taking on more duties on behalf of the Queen, who is in her 90th year, and perhaps the notion of spending so much money on a ‘vanity project’ in an age of austerity and soaring house prices might make him look a touch antediluvian. Maybe somebody had a word in his ear.
Indeed, it is not so very long since Prince Charles headed up a consortium that splashed out £45 million on the whimsical acquisition, in 2007, of Dumfries House.
He used £20 million borrowed against his own Charities Foundation, and personally brokered more funds from benefactors, sponsors, charities and heritage bodies — for all of them, the vast stately home was an impulse-buy on the grandest scale.
Charles was an admirer of the house, and its priceless collection of Chippendale furniture — and planned to use it as an engine of economic regeneration for the depressed local area.
Yet the scale of the expenditure sent a shudder through the very foundations of his court and even, according to some, triggered the decision of his trusted private secretary, advisor and guide, Sir Michael Peat, to quit his full-time job with the Prince. Sir Michael said he wished to return to the private sector, declaring: ‘After nine years, the time is right for a change.’
These days, royal spin-doctors have successfully convinced people that Charles ‘saved Dumfries House for the nation’ — but in truth the house was in no danger, and the nation did not ask him to be so foolhardy with other people’s money.
Yet architecture remains a passion, and a burning ambition to build evidently endures.
It was in 1984 that Charles got up at a dinner given by the Royal Institute of British Architects and skewered a proposed extension to the National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square as ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an old friend’.
The plans were dumped, the architects involved went out of business and Charles suddenly felt a heady whiff of power.
Before long, he was at it again. ‘You have to give this to the Luftwaffe — when it bombed our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than a pile of rubble,’ he sneered, in response to a proposed new scheme by Richard Rogers next to St Paul’s Cathedral.
His influence, too, put a stop to a much-admired design by legendary architect Mies van der Rohe near the Bank of England. Our modernday Don Quixote had found something to stick with his lance.
With the chance now to bite back at their blue-blooded adversary, many architects are keen to deride his Greco-Roman pile.
‘This house is pompous, lumpen and over-scaled,’ says Urban Realm’s John Glenday. ‘Looming over the existing chapel, [it has] none of the finesse of a true Greco-Roman design. There’s not an original stone to be seen in the entire confection, which manages to be at once both bland and ostentatious.’ And despite our future king’s devotion to the past, he does not serve it well, according to Glenday: ‘It will not stand as a symbol of a romantic past but as a monument to delusions of grandeur.
‘Ultimately, the success of these type of projects boils down to the materials and craftsmanship, neither of which sadly are likely to match that of the genuine article.’
The distinguished architectural theorist Douglas Murphy takes another tack, damning Charles’s folly with faint praise.
‘The Prince of Wales’s proposals are a perfectly agreeable exercise in retrospective design,’ he sighs, before adding dismissively: ‘Built with care, they will no doubt be a delightful addition to the landscape.
‘However, a high-quality bespoke residence on a country estate does highlight the difficulties [in] attempting to achieve traditional architecture within the context of a modernised construction industry.
‘Without the luxury of paying for the few remaining craftsmen capable of achieving traditional workmanship, classically styled architecture all too often appears as kitsch, its machinemade handiwork a mockery of the timeless qualities it strives for.’
A polite put-down if ever there was. Charles, though, will not be fazed by such criticism. In fact, it will probably reinforce his resolve.
Charles’s predecessor ‘Prinny’, the future George IV, received a rap over the knuckles from the prime minister of the day, Lord Liverpool, after blowing the equivalent of £24 million refurbishing his Brighton Pavilion, which was ‘still not fit to live in’, according to one visitor.
The foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, too, angrily condemned the prince’s ‘profligacy and extravagance’.
Somehow, you can’t picture David Cameron and the current Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, doing the same over Prince Charles’s folly. Indeed, it seems we are much more polite these days when it comes to princes squandering their money.