Many rooms with a view

Three homes have received new life thanks to some sensitive and extensive renovations

- Penny Churchill

THE recent launch onto the market of the exquisite, Grade II*-listed Studley Royal House near Ripon, North Yorkshire, at a guide price of £8 million through Savills Country Department (020– 7409 8881), offers a rare chance to enjoy the privacy and pleasure of a grand country estate with none of the bother, thanks to its location at the heart of the magnificent, 800-acre Studley Royal Deer Park, now owned by the National Trust.

North Yorkshire’s only World Heritage Site, the park is not only home to a large herd of fallow, red and sika deer, it also boasts famous 18th-century water gardens fed by the River Skell, which meanders past the atmospheric ruins of Fountains Abbey—a setting described by Christopher Hussey in his English Gardens and Landscapes 1700-1750 (1967) as ‘one of the most spectacular scenic compositions in England’.

Fountains Abbey was founded in 1132 and, by the mid 13th century, was one of the richest religious houses in the kingdom. Following the Dissolution, the abbey was sacked, before the buildings and more than 500 acres of land were sold to Richard Gresham, an MP and former Lord Mayor of London. He later sold them to Stephen Proctor, who further despoiled the abbey, using the stone to build the Elizabethan Fountains Hall.

In 1699, John Aislabie, an ambitious politician who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1718, but expelled from Parliament in 1720 following the South Sea Bubble debacle, inherited the Studley Royal estate, where, for the rest of his life, he indulged his passion for landscape gardening. It was a passion shared by his son, William, who inherited the estate in 1742 and began extending the pleasure grounds into the eastern part of the Skell valley.