Eyes Wide Open
Kubrick's house sailed through the era of conservation entirely uninfluenced by heritage culture
Imagine an English country house standing on a billiard-table-flat piece of landscape north of London. Built by a furniture magnate in the 1890s it enjoyed few years of glory before falling into serious neglect after the First World War and being requisitioned by the army during the Second. After 1945 was worse. It passed through the hands of several feckless owners who sold off most of its 12,000 acres of land. Finally, in the early 1970s, with only 200 acres left, it was sold to the film director Stanley Kubrick. From then until his death last year the house worked for him.
To those accustomed to seeing country houses only in the condition to which they are restored for TV adaptations of Jane Austen novels, it comes as a shock to visit one that had apparently sailed through the era of conservation entirely uninfluenced by heritage culture. Kubrick's house had electric gates, but they could easily be stepped over and in any case the main entrance had been closed off for 20 years so that trees had overgrown the grand portico to make it barely visible. Conversely the once elaborate and labour-intensive gardens had been reduced to dead-straight vistas of machine-maintainable lawn and hedge everywhere except inside a walled kitchen garden, where gigantic plants had burst through the glass roofs of untended greenhouses like Triffids making a bid for freedom. The outbuildings displayed a similar contrast. Only rusting screw props held up the roof of the dairy (chiefly used to store huge baskets full of candles left over from Barry Lyndon), while the hollow square of the stable block had been turned into a barred and gated store for larger and more valuable things.
As for the house itself -- a three storey neo-classic structure, part exfoliating stucco and part crumbling brick -- it was in a state of careless disrepair rarely seen these days except in news footage from Grozny. Indoors its grandest rooms were merely a chaos of desks, files, furniture, computers and cinematic props of all kinds. Outside, the tall ground floor windows were screened by an artless enclosure of steel angles and chain link fencing. Viewed from the lawn this caging made the house look like a police post in Northern Ireland.
The most remarkable thing about all this was how unusual such practical treatment is nowadays. It showed that Kubrick -- who must have been among the most perceptive of men -- had simply used his fine piece of domestic architecture as though it were a utensil rather than an object of art historical importance. At first this seemed somehow sacreligious but on reflection it was not. It reflected a more historically authentic attitude than does the cultural posturing of most owners of English country houses who put anti-EC pamphlets on display, speak of so called 'original William Kent windows' that cannot be opened, and display what they claim to be a scale model of an ancestor's East Indiaman, even though it is fitted out with more guns than HMS Victory.
Beyond the institutional and privately owned country house open to the public there are other fates. There are houses taken over by big corporations as 'training centres' or 'rest homes' for executives shattered by the exhausting demands of regular employment. There are Great Houses converted into 104 apartments where, as the estate agents advertisement coyly puts it, for anything from £150,000 to half a million 'you can make an entrance' (even if it is only through what used to be the door to the stables). There are even country houses that have been reduced to the status of the radiator badge on a car by being almost swamped in low-rise office or laboratory buildings dedicated to the sale of mobile phones or the discovery of the last secrets of the genome.
All these fates are more or less disagreeable compared to the most real and rarest thing, the careless look of Stanley Kubrick's country house that had been treated as an instrument not a monument. 3