It's that time of year again when hundreds of London properties open their doors to the public if you know where to look. It's also the time of year that I visit lots of places and write about them, so steel yourself. That said I only visited two yesterday, way out in far-flung Havering, having long thought "I'd love to see them but they don't really fit in with anywhere else I'm going." Both were old buildings, both were fascinating, and in both cases the true nature of the owner came as a slow reveal. In good news the more interesting of the two is open again today.
Open House:The Round House (Havering-atte-Bower) The Elliptical One
If you've walked the London Loop you'll have seen this extraordinary building, all round and turrety, as you make a start on section 21.
But this is not the Round House, it's a water tower erected by the South East Essex Water Company in 1934.
The Round House is a couple of doors down, mostly hidden behind trees, and is considerably older. It's also not round, it's patently elliptical.
The Round House was built in Havering-atte-Bower around 1794 by City lawyer William Sheldon, a man of wealth. It's believed architect John Plaw was invited to design the house which was heavily based on Belle Isle, one of his earlier creations that still sits on an island in the middle of Lake Windermere. What he built here on an Essex hilltop was an elegant oval stucco villa with three floors, plus a sub-basement underneath where the skivvier aspects of the house were hidden. The Italianate roof is shallow-pitched with a copper top and eaves that project a metre above the attic windows. Some of these details would later become the height of fashion but they were rare for the 1790s, hence the Round House merits an asterisked Grade II* listing. And it has quite a history.
Sheldon never lived here, he hired it out before selling it off fairly swiftly in 1807. It then passed through various families by marriage, ending up in the hands of a Romford vicar who used the large field out back to satisfy his passion for breeding roses. During WW2 it was requisitioned by the army and may have been used to house PoWs, before falling into disrepair and being bought up by Mr Heap, the owner of the Hall nextdoor. Weatherproofing proved very expensive, ultimately cripplingly so, and it was 1982 before renovations finally allowed his son to move in along with his wife and young daughter Imogen. The Round House is now Imogen's domain and she opens up every year for Open House, with an exemplary array of introductory refreshments in a yurt on the lawn.
The first part of the tour is around the outside, admiring the sleek curves and the copper top and the clever drainpipes that ran inside the building to stop them freezing in winter. A particularly interesting outbuilding is the old dairy, half squashed by a tree in the Great Storm of 1987, and since repurposed as a cute brick summerhouse. From here a low passage ducks beneath an arch to join up with an elliptical passage around the foot of the building once used by servants to gain access. Anyone important would have entered up the Portland stone steps at the front and been confronted by the central hallway with its curving cantilever staircase. "No photos in the house," said Imogen, "but there's a full visual walkthrough online" (which you can delight in here).
We climbed circuitously to the second floor and admired the modern mural on the oval toplight. We stood in the one place in the bedroom where you can see all the way to the City of London above the tops of the trees. On the first floor we stepped out cautiously onto the narrow copper balcony. We squeezed into the shower room where Imogen had managed to persuade English Heritage to let her strip back the walls to reveal the original layered structure beneath. On the ground floor we admired dazzling paintjobs, also the new kitchen her mother had added because making food in the scullery and hoisting it up by dumb waiter was no longer practical.
And all the time we were thinking "this is not what the inside of a house normally looks like", it having been generously decked out with art rooms and creative opportunities for all-round stimulation, and on the ground floor a music room to make any inventive child squeal with delight. Imogen's plan is not to live here but to create an community of the arts where children and their families can explore and learn beyond the usual curriculum, modus operandi to be confirmed but possibly incorporating blockchain and AI. Only when we reached the basement did the penny finally drop as we were led into a recording studio (the Hideaway) with a modest gesture towards the far shelf "...and those are my Grammys".
Because the Round House is the childhood home and current passion of the musician ImogenHeap, BRIT School alumnus and electropop pioneer, and winner of the Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical in 2010. I see now why she called that album Ellipse. She also has a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2016 because she co-wrote and produced the final track on Taylor Swift's seminal album 1989, and is responsible for thescore of the West End play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (both parts). This is not what you expect when you wander in off a farm track past an anonymous Open House banner. I left buzzing, and wishing I was 10 again so I could go back and enjoy the reborn Round House properly.
Open House:Bower House (Havering-atte-Bower) The Country Mansion One
The lofty heights of Havering-atte-Bower were much in demand by moneyed City types in the 18th century, Bower House being founded by Serjeant-at-Law John Baynes in 1729. He hired a young architect called Henry Flitcroft (who'd later be let loose on parts of Woburn Abbey) and he knocked up a two storey redbrick mansion with views across three counties. For the stairwell he invited Sir James Thornhill to paint a mural, he the man most famous for the ceiling of the Painted Hall in Greenwich which likely explains how Bower House got a Grade I listing. You'll find it on Orange Tree Hill just below the Orange Tree pub, and if it's Open House a very polite suited youth will beep the sidegate and let you in.
Black suits and youth appeared to be common to most of the volunteers showing us round, each perking up with explanatory background every time you walked into a fresh room. They wanted to enthuse about the portraits, the panelling and the backstory, for example the sculpted arms of Edward III above the fireplace in the hall which looked too fresh to be genuine, but the original owners had apparently been convinced of its veracity. They're cheerily forceful this lot, I thought, as I tried to make a break for it on the stairs but was told to wait until the end of the recap so I could learn that Inigo Jones designed the plasterwork on the ceiling.
The NW Bedchamber was strange because it had clearly been converted into a bar at some point but wasn't now. It turned out the building had been acquired by the Ford Motor Company in 1970 and was used by management as a training centre, so I suspect many a pint of Double Diamond was pulled behind that counter whereas now it saw nothing worse than the occasional coffee or soft drink. In the library upstairs our host was keen to say it had been the main bedchamber and point out where the fireplace used to be, whereas I was scanning the pristine collection of religious books and magazines and trying to work out who Watchman Nee and Witness Lee might be.
It turns out that Bower House is the main UK facility for a Christian charity called the Amana Trust - has been since 2005 - and they use it for seminars and as a residential training centre. Here students can embark on a two-year Bible school course, the Amana Trust being particularly keen on picking apart the holy book in intricate detail. I appreciate that they didn't try to foist any of this on Open House visitors, nor direct everyone out through their bookshop, merely leaving a few free booklets on a table in a single room. I would have stayed for a free cup of tea and a packet of biscuits but the 375 was leaving from outside in a few minutes so I left them to it, eyes opened to what goes on behind yet another normally-closed door.
