‘A picture of magic beauty'

A Georgian house remodelled in the Gothic style became a seat of the Gillow family, famous for their furniture-making business, in 1824. John Martin Robinson looks at the remarkable story of the house and its collections Photographs by Paul Highnam

- Paul Highnam

Fig 1: The main stair is separated from the entrance hall by a delicate iron screen

Leighton Hall, Lancashire The home of Mrs Susan Gillow Reynolds

LEIGHTON HALL enjoys an astonishing setting. Its sloping, saucer shaped park, with woods of beech, oak and sycamore, frames views over the estuaries of Morecambe Bay to the Lake District fells silhouetted in the distance. It is described in Peter Fleetwood- Hesketh’s Murray’s Lancashire Architectural Guide as ‘a picture of magic beauty, with the distant fairyland of Furness beyond’. The whole scene is the very quintessence of English Picturesque taste, with the early- 19th-century castellated façade, built of finely dressed white limestone, looking like an opera set against the sublime landscape backdrop. When the sun shines and the white stone gleams, it seems a barely credible vision (Fig 6). This remarkable house has been the seat of the Gillow family, descended from the famous furniture manufacturers, since 1824.

Fig 2 above: The library with its Gothic chimneypiece.

Leighton is essentially a Georgian house on an older site, re-fronted in the 1820s to give it a Gothic air. The architect for the Regency re-fronting is not known, but the work has been attributed to Thomas Harrison of Chester or Joseph Gandy, who worked at Lancaster Castle (COUNTRY LIFE, December 9, 2015), where the architecture shows similar characteristics. There is no evidence, however, for any involvement by Harrison and it is more likely that the re-facing was by the local Lancashire architect Robert Roper of Preston, on the strength of comparison with Roper’s Gothic re-fronting in 1823 of Thurnham Hall, south of Lancaster, for the Daltons, fellow Catholics, friends and neighbours.