Ashcombe House

There have been several buildings on the site. The first house was built in 1686 by a local squire, Robert Barber. Some fifty years later, in 1740, the Barber family entirely demolished the 1686 house and rebuilt on the site. In 1750 Anne Wyndham inherited the house. The next year she married the Hon. James Everard Arundell, third son of the 6th Baron Arundell of Wardour. In 1754 the architect Francis Cartwright largely remodelled the interior of the house for the Arundells. In 1815 the Ashcombe Estate was purchased from Lady Arundell by Thomas Grove the younger of Ferne House for £8,700. Thomas Grove's grandson Sir Walter demolished most of the 1740 house in around 1870. Sir Walter later…

The photographer and designer Cecil Beaton first visited the house in 1930, taken there by the sculptor Stephen Tomlin together with the writer Edith Olivier.</blockquote> That same year Mr Borley leased Ashcombe House to Beaton for £50 a year, a very small rent, on the condition that Beaton would make improvements to the house, which was all but derelict. Beaton employed the Austrian architect Michael Rosenauer to make substantial alterations to the material of the house, including a passageway through the house to unite the front and the back, and elongating the windows. Plumbing and electricity were installed. The artist Rex Whistler designed the Palladian front door surround, with its…