Knightshayes Court

Knightshayes Court stands on a gentle rise above the Exe valley near Tiverton in Devon. The Heathcoat-Amory family demolished an earlier Georgian house in 1868 and commissioned William Burges to design a new Victorian mansion. Nikolaus Pevsner called it “an eloquent expression of High Victorian ideals in a country house of moderate size.” The house is Grade I listed and its gardens are Grade II* listed. The estate once overlooked the family’s lace factory in the valley below. The present building was completed in 1874 after Burges was dismissed and replaced by John Dibblee Crace. The interior was meant to be a riot of Burges’s colour and fantasy, but only fragments survive. A drawing-room ceiling rediscovered in 1981 had been boarded over in 1889. The National Trust has restored some Burges-designed fittings brought from other houses, including a marble fireplace from Worcester College, Oxford. A presentation album shows how the interiors might have looked. The house also holds what may be a Rembrandt self-portrait. During the Second World War it served as a convalescent home for the U.S. Eighth Air Force. The gardens were laid out by Edward Kemp and later simplified. Sir John and Lady Heathcoat-Amory won the Royal Horticultural Society’s Victoria Medal of Honour for their work. Advice came from the American designer Lanning Roper, who remodelled the 19th-century bowling green. The estate includes a rare 1907 stické court, extensive topiary, specimen trees and a walled kitchen garden by Burges. The stables and the bowling green remain visible reminders of the family’s life here.