Making space in the country house: practice, performance and plans

The country house is often seen as fixed and permanent: a stable space, produced to a blue print that, once manifest in stone and plaster, remained largely unchanged. As Girouard argues, it was both a reflection and expression of the power of its owner, imprinting their status and identity onto the landscape in complex, but essentially uncomplicated ways. Read in this way, the country house is all about status and taste, but it also gave its owner, and the landowning classes more generally, ‘a sense of identity, of achievement, and of permanence’. In reality, the situation was rarely this straightforward. I have argued elsewhere that ‘viewing the great house as the embodiment of social and cultural capital places emphasis on outcomes and often overlooks the processes of consumption’. It also ignores the constant flux which characterised any house, but particularly those of the landed elite. Flows of people, goods, capital and knowledge ran into, out from and through the house, producing and reproducing space as they went. In this way, space can be seen as both the product of human activity and the active context in which that activity took place. Such arguments have been rehearsed in many contexts over the last twenty years or so, mostly by geographers but increasingly by historians who took the spatial turn. Yet attention has largely focused on urban rather than domestic space, and the country house has yet to be explored through such ideas. In this paper, then, I want to address this lacuna, drawing in particular on the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, who posited a so-called ‘trialectics of spatiality’. This comprised lived space, produced by routine and everyday practices; representations of space, which are conceived, codified and planned by elites and professionals; and spaces of representation, in which the individual rather than society is reflected and which are often associated with attempts to subvert dominant spatial practices and spatialities.