Remembering the New World

Carolside, The Borders The home of Mr and Mrs Anthony Foyle An enigmatic house on the Scottish Borders yields up unexpected connections with America and shines a light on 18th-century architectural practice, as Roger White explains

- Roger White

CAROLSIDE is tucked away in the sheltered valley of the Leader Water as it flows south into the Tweed near Melrose. Descending the present drive from the east, the first glimpse of the house is of a dignified Palladian frontage, five bays wide and three storeys high, with tiers of sash windows and a porch—a later addition—in the centre (Fig 1). Framing this frontage are symmetrical lower wings and behind a lower extension, still Georgian in appearance, but not at all symmetrical.

The history of Carolside and its estate is cloaked in uncertainty, which makes it difficult to be definite about very much of its history at all. That makes one particular architectural insight about the house all the more important: that five-bay centrepiece is clearly derived from Isaac Ware’s design for Chesterfield House, Mayfair, built-in 1748–49 and demolished in 1937. Although now little remembered, this townhouse of the Earls of Chesterfield was greatly admired in its day and its façade also informed the design of Gunsgreen House on the Berwickshire coast at Eyemouth, datable to the early 1750s (COUNTRY LIFE, January 27, 2010). The anonymous architect of the façade at Carolside need not have visited London to see it, as it was extensively illustrated in Ware’s massive tome A Complete Body of Architecture (Fig 2), published in 1756–57, which exercised notable influence north of the Border.