A magical touch

COUNTRY LIFE played a formative role in the development of Edwardian architectural taste, championing eclecticism and engaging with history, as Timothy Brittain-Catlin reveals

- Timothy Brittain-Catlin

NOT only the country-house ideal as we know it, but the whole of Edwardian domestic architecture was shaped by COUNTRY LIFE. Some of the reasons why this came about are straightforward: the magazine had the best critics, the most educated social historians and the most comprehensive experts in gardening and house design of any regular publication, not to mention the campaign it maintained for more than a decade to raise standards. Other reasons, however, are more in the realm of magic.

COUNTRY LIFE’s first number came out in January 1897 and, right from the start, there were illustrated scholarly articles on the historic homes of England. This was a novelty: there were then few places where readers could be regularly tempted into a properly researched, accurate account of an old house, however famous. In the early days, these were mostly Tudor buildings: the Edwardian neo-Classical revival had not yet happened. They were also, however, often in a mixture of styles: an Elizabethan core might have acquired a Carolean staircase, an 18thcentury ballroom or an early-Victorian service wing and the magazine clearly took pleasure in the variety. These combinations—which are hardly ever mentioned in architectural history, with its focus on the purity of a particular era—seem to have been precisely the thing that captivated the magazine’s writers.