HOUSE OF FUN
Marie-claire Chappet gets lost amid the labyrinthine passageways and assorted oddities of Oxfordshire’s Stonor Park
Nothing is as it seems at Stonor Park, the ancestral seat of the Stonor family for more than 850 years. There is no logical layout, nothing so straightforward as a ground, first or second floor. Stairs that seem destined to take you up, may inexplicably lead you back down. One dreads to think how guests fare seeking out a bathroom in the middle of the night.
It’s the position of the house – tucked into the hills of South Oxfordshire – that affords its eccentric levels. The façade, added in 1580, encases almost 10 distinct buildings within. All have been adapted over the past eight centuries, making it a patchwork of contrasting architectural styles.
The charming discordance of these various influences is apparent from the moment you open the main door. Sunlight enters through mediaeval stained-glass windows, blue and red heraldic shields adorn the walls and Gothic tracery abounds. But then other eras begin to intrude. A 19thcentury hatstand presides over the stone stairwell, replete with varied headwear, from a Nepalese-army Gurkha hat to a Palio cap from one of the Sienese Contrade – both of which are more recent relics from the 1990s. Behind a stocky 12thcentury door is a Regency drawing-room. Instead of the anticipated armoury of feudal knights, there is Victorian silhouette portraiture set against soft, dusty-pink walls.
Encompassing more than 80 rooms, including 18 bedrooms, an archive, two formal dining-rooms, three galleries, a library and a
study, Stonor Park should be chaos. But attention has been paid to embracing the quirkiness of the house and working with, rather than against it. In the 13th-century chapel, you find the Stations of the Cross fashioned from Red Cross shipping crates in World War II by a Polish prisoner of war and given to the Stonors by the author Graham Greene. The blue dining-room bears witness to the family’s American connection: it is furnished with a collection of glass and silverware from the collateral branch that founded Brown University in Rhode Island, and American-eagle wall lights gaze across a French panoramic-landscape wallpaper by Joseph Dufour.
‘And the doors are always taking you to unexpected places,’ says Ailsa Stonor, the current chatelaine and a landscape designer. Despite having moved in five years ago, she still feels as though she were in the first throes of bemused appreciation for this curious mansion where her husband William grew up. The couple met at a London dinner party in 2001 and fell in love travelling across the Gobi Desert with friends. In 2016, they moved to Stonor with their three children, after 10 years in Delhi and China, thanks to William’s previous role in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
‘I’m so grateful she agreed to come with me and take all this on,’ William says, smiling sheepishly at his wife, after mentioning the £400,000 roof repair they completed last year. The pair are seated in the Japanese Room, their private sitting-room on the western side of the house. The Japanese art that once gave the room its name is now hanging in the adjacent Wool House, a converted 16th-century mill where William’s parents, Lord and Lady Camoys, reside. ‘We’re actually rather jealous of their proper insulation.’
The Stonor family’s longevity at the house makes it one of the oldest privately owned homes in Britain, outdating many Royal palaces, and explains the heady amount of history on display here, both private and political. There are maps and documents alluding to the family’s government work (Lord Camoys was Royal Chamberlain to the Queen until
2000), and a ‘socking great bullet hole’ from a more ancient time punched through the main hall’s window. ‘We still haven’t quite worked out how it got there,’ William says.
Clearly the Stonors are no strangers to adversity – nor violence. They remained Catholic during the Reformation and endured centuries of ostracisation, oppression, exorbitant taxation and, on frequent occasions, the threat of execution. Indeed, an infamous slice of religious history happened in their attic, where St Edmund Campion – a Jesuit priest, canonised in 1970 – hid while printing his controversial anti-protestant pamphlet Ten Reasons in 1581. The hiding space, a brilliantly concealed priest hole, is still there to see, and the affectionately nicknamed ‘Campion Roof’ was the cause of that hefty repair…
The Stonors’ story is etched into every corner, building up over time like the mismatched architecture. Their own highlight is the Shell Bed – which looks like a Botticelli scallop – that stands in Francis Stonor’s bedroom. ‘Everyone loves it, it is so unique,’ William says, sharing his theory that it inspired the Bond villain Franz Sanchez’s bed in Licence to Kill; the preceding 007 film The Living Daylights was shot at Stonor Park in 1987. The couple occasionally sleep in it, just for fun. ‘It is surprisingly comfortable,’ says Ailsa.
That’s the overwhelming feeling of Stonor. Although it is open to the public – and will host a glamping site on its 250 acres this summer – it is very much a living, breathing home, where the past sits happily alongside the present: visiting family and friends are often jostled out of historic four-posters in time for tourists to walk around the bedrooms. While the young family predominantly reside in their cosy private wing, they frequently eat in the blue dining-room, celebrate special occasions in the Gothic Hall and erect their Christmas tree in the grand drawing-room.
It is a shining example of how to live comfortably with the past and how to integrate memories – both ancestral and recently cherished – into a dynamic, warm and busy family home that is an inspiring place to visit. If only one could figure out through which door to leave… www.stonor.com
THE HIDING SPACE, A BRILLIANTLY CONCEALED PRIEST HOLE, IS STILL THERE TO SEE