The serene interior

Longstowe Hall, Cambridgeshire The home of William and Mercedes Bevan | The remodeling of an Elizabethan house by an Edwardian industrialist created superb interiors in the aesthetic of 17th-century Dutch art

- Jeremy Musson

The library of the early 1900s, with Flemish relief carving in the panelling, was the dining room in the later 20th century

PASSING through the front door of Longstowe Hall, the modern visitor would be forgiven for imagining that they had stepped into a 17th-century Dutch painting. In the hall-and, the spaces radiating off it—the fall of natural light animates the rich surfaces and textures of stone, marble, wood, plaster and metal to create serene interiors. Old oak combines with marquetry pieces and fragments of Continental carving. The illusion is not an accident. It underlines an intense admiration in about 1900—when these spaces were reworked in their present form-for the paintings of artists such as Jan Steen and Johannes Vermeer. Exactly the same aesthetic is apparent in the early architectural photography of COUNTRY LIFE.

Longstowe Hall is, in origin, an Elizabethan brick manor house built on a traditional E-plan. As the Cambridge Chronicle of 1867 notes, however, it was 'almost rebuilt' by Cambridge architect William Fawcett for the then owner, one Sidney Stanley. From this era, the house retains its huge, west-facing drawing-room, with a French-style marble chimneypiece and restrained neo-Jacobean plasterwork. Some earlier interiors were also preserved, such as the neighbouring morning room in an 18th-century spirit. This was recorded by the artist David Wilkie, who stayed at the house in about 1840.