From the archive: Nancy Mitford writes about Faringdon House (1950)
2017 marks 70 years since House & Garden magazine first hit the news stands as the quaterly 'Vogue House & Garden Book', bound to its sister magazine with a silk ribbon. As part of a series of articles delving in to the magazine's history we revisit our 1950 feature on Faringdon house by the inimitable society writer Nancy Mitford. Lord Berners - its owner and a great friend, had just died. Mitford, who had affectionately portrayed him as 'Lord Merlin' in her classic novel Love in a Cold Climate, here describes his life at Faringdon.
"This article is a tribute to an artist, musician, wit and kindly host."
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When Mr. Wood of Bath built Faringdon House, about the middle of the 18th century, his customer was Poet Laureate Pye (generally supposed to have been the worst poet laureate England has ever had and described as eminently respectable in everything but his poetry' by Lord Byron who, of course, knew all about respectability). Pye ordered the house to be built, and Pye paid the bill, established himself there, wrote reams of dreary long-forgotten verse in praise of his master George III, and brought up his dreary long-forgotten children beneath its roof. But I believe that Mr. Wood, gifted with second sight, saw 200 years beyond the laureate and built it specially for Lord Berners, its late occupant. For those who were lucky enough to be friends of the lord and therefore visitors to his house, he being the most hospitable of men, found it impossible to think of one without the other; so much of a piece, both standing four-square on English soil, but both formed in all their essential proportions by European classicism.
Faringdon is a real country house for all its elegance, not one of those pretty old-maidish town houses that sometimes occur in the English countryside, looking sweet but silly, and exhaling an atmosphere of afternoon tea. It is plain and grey and square and solid, and as much a part of the rolling Berkshire landscape before it as of the little old market town of Faringdon, to which it turns its back and which is hidden from view by the parish church and huge clumps of elm trees. Faringdon House has very little in the way of a flower garden, Lord Berners was not fond of flowers growing in beds, and considered that such things as herbaceous borders were more suitable to the half-timbered houses of Surrey stockbrokers than to a classical house, which should be surrounded by a plain expanse of lawn to enhance the perfection of its line. Indoors, his house, as we shall see, was always full of flowers but they were large brilliant tropical flowers in vases, not buttercups, the little children's dower.
A broad space of lawn runs from the house to the church-it is bordered by elm trees and, until it came down in a March gale, a big cedar stood there. Cedars are crashing all over England now. As the fashion for planting them only began in the 18th century and as their allotted span is a thousand years this seems rather inexplicable. Perhaps now that tea under the cedars, that daily sacrifice to them in fine weather, when footmen in striped waistcoats placed trays of glittering silver beneath their shade every afternoon, has become a thing of the past, they are sulkily dying of boredom. Anyhow, for a while, Faringdon smelled deliciously of burning cedarwood as a result.
At the end of the lawn, overshadowed by the trees on one side and the church on the other, and hedged with a tangle of roses and mock orange, there is a grassy walk where, head in hand, on moonless nights, appears the ghost of Hampden Pye. His story has been immortalised in The Ingoldsby Legends under the name of Hamilton Tighe. It seems that he was a sailor who married a peasant and that his uncle, Admiral Pye, in the best traditions of the British Navy, sent him to the forefront of the battle, so that he should be killed, which he duly was, his poor head being blown off.
So Faringdon acquired that which every respectable country house must have, a ghost. It also has, equally important, a rookery and a flock of pigeons. And such pigeons! They are Lord Berners' famous multi-coloured birds, but it is no use asking for a sitting of eggs, for the secret of their brilliant plumage lies less in the breeding than in what used to happen to them every Easter Sunday, when they were dyed and dried in the linen cupboard, before being set free to flutter, like a cloud of confetti, between church and house, to astonish the students of bird-life in Berkshire. This bird motif, repeated over and over again inside the house, is the signature of its late owner, so to speak, who preferred feathered to many other sorts of friends. As with flowers, he rather disdained the modest English sparrow, eschewing it for something gaudier.
The town, though its presence can be felt, is invisible from the house itself, but the huge walled kitchen garden, a perfect village of hot-houses, lies on a southern slope overlooking it, and has a delicious view of the old roofs and gardens descending the opposite slope to a little stream. This kitchen garden, I must say in passing, ministers most wonderfully to the house, and produces exquisite vegetables, fruit and flowers with a perfect disregard for the slow-rolling seasons, the vagaries of the Berkshire climate, and indeed of all known rules. Mr. Cyril Connolly once said that if every sort of luxury had been forever banned in England, Lord Berners would somehow have managed to maintain a secret melon house. To the north, Faringdon has a most beautiful view, enjoyed by all the principal rooms in the house. It extends, from a terrace buried in honeysuckle, for many miles over a landscape such as is beloved by all English sporting painters, from Stubbs to Cecil Alden, that is to say a patchwork of fields and hedges, dotted with elm trees. Not a house or building of any sort can be seen, not a pylon nor one inch of wire, just green English grass alternating with brown English arable, mile after mile, until finally they merge into the pale but piercing blue of a far distant horizon.
Such is Faringdon House as it stands in its environment, sober and restrained, typical abode, you would say, of an English country squire. Typical, except perhaps for the coloured pigeons, the striped pink and white Italian tubs, full of geraniums, round the front, and that curious motor drawn up in the drive, a smart coupé of 1904. Not quite typical, and inside not typical at all. Open the front door, there was scented warmth, there was such light, such a profusion of flowers, such a river of witty chat, accompanied by tunes from hidden musical boxes.
We must give it to Mr. Wood of Bath that he did his bit. He placed the house upon a semi-basement, which always makes for warmth and comfort, and to this basement with real 18th-century carelessness, he relegated both God and the cook, putting chapel and kitchen there side by side. He introduced a graceful double staircase, pillars, decorated plaster ceilings, classical chimney pieces, and as many pretty details, most likely, as the poet laureate was willing to afford: the proportions of all the rooms are excellent. Upon this prettiness, this excellence, Lord Berners superimposed his own taste and fantasy, and created something so personal that it is very difficult to convey its aspect to those who have not seen for themselves.
I can remember, during all the tedious or frightening but always sleepless nights of fire-watching in wartime London, that the one place I longed to be in most intensely was the red bedroom at Faringdon, with its crackling fire, its Bessarabian carpet of bunchy flowers, and above all, its four-post bed, whence, from beneath a huge fat fluffy old fashioned quilt one could gaze out at the view, head still on pillow.
It was always a great treat to stay at Faringdon, but during the War it was paradise to people working in London, since there they found a double relief from discomfort and from boredom.
During the war the big drawing room, with its white flock paper and priceless French and Italian furniture, was shut up in favour of the little green drawing room. This was as pretty, cozy and characteristic as a room could be, its dark olive walls providing the perfect back ground for a riot of tropical birds, some alive and hopping about some stuffed in cases, some presse like flowers upon a screen, so modelled in china, one jumping with a song out of a gold box, and hundreds between the green Morocco covers of Mr. Gould. Like all the rest of the house this room, filled with flowers of the brighter colours, arranged under the Lord Berners himself. His ancestors, simpering or morose, hung high upon the walls and for neighbours at eye-level, a Paul Klee, one or two of Lord Berner's own Roman landscapes, and selection of Impressionists and others, including Sisley, Corot, Degas, Boudin and Matisse. Mr Pye would be startled if he could see his austere little room with its sporting-print-vew glittering like a jewel box - Mr. Wood, I think, might find it very much to his taste.
There is something magical about Faringdon, and Lord Berners himself in his skull cap, looked not unlike a magician, but perhaps the greatest, most amazing conjuring tricks were reserved for the dining room. In this pleasant sunny white room scattered with large silver-gilt birds and wonderful Sèvres and Dresden china, a standard of culinary perfection was maintained through the darkest days of war. Cook or no cook, raw materials or no raw materials, a succession of delicious courses would somehow waft themselves to the sideboard, and the poor Londoner, starved or sated with Spam, would see sights and taste tastes he had long ago forgotten to believe in.
Faringdon was solid and elegant and so was Lord Berners. So great was his sense of elegance, fantasy and humour that the solid quality of his talents, and above all the immense amount of hard work he did all his life, are sometimes overlooked, though a moment's reflection would show that without great talent and hard work he could not, as he did, write and paint like a professional, in addition to shining as a composer of music. Stravinsky himself said that at one time the only important living English composer was Lord Berners. But one of the greatest of his achievements was the atmosphere he created around himself at Faringdon, a house where the second best was never tolerated, either in comfort, conversation or in manners.
After his death Lord Berners bequethed Faringdon and all its contents to the young writer Sofka Zinovieff - then aged just 25 years old. The unexpected inheritance is the stuff of fairytale, and three decades on, she and her family have made the house their own, while preserving the spirit of their predecessors. House & Garden revisted the house in 2016. To find out what happened in the next chapter of its history click here.
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