ARTS

Architecture

Phoenix on the Downs

Laurence Marks admires the impressive recreation of Uppark after the great fire

mittee of the National Trust met at St Anne's Gate to decide the future of Uppark. The 1680s house on top of the Sussex Downs, with a distant view of the Solent, had been gutted by fire five weeks earlier. The roof and upper floors had been destroyed, though the shell (brick with Portland stone dressings) remained stand- ing up to the level of the cornice. The ground floor rooms were open to the sky, and many important decorative schemes ruined. Fortunately 95 per cent of the fur- niture and pictures had been saved.

The committee had three options. It could rebuild and repair, hoping to create a convincing simulacrum of what had been lost. It could demolish the building and leave the site empty. It could commission a 20th-century replacement in which to dis- play the orphaned contents.

The science and arts of conservation have greatly improved under the Trust's attentive patronage in the past 40 years. The coarsening of detail and lifeless carv- ing one sees in some City churches restored after the second world war are now less common. There is a good example at Hampton Court, another fire casualty, where David Esterley's substitutions for the Grinling Gibbons carvings come close to the spirit of the master.

But the Trust had never before attempt- ed so ambitious a restoration. It had demolished two houses — Dunsland in wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ven- tured. 'You can't repeat the past.'

`Can't repeat the past,' he cried incredu- lously. 'Why of course you can!'

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

`I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said.

The Great Gatsby 0 n 6 October 1989 the executive com- .1.:IlitfUltl,G in/1U of uppum LIGICI1C IIIC JUL" Devon and Coleshill in Oxfordshire after bad fires. Uppark's charm for its admirers lay in its slightly shabby grandeur side-by-side with a homely plainness, in its character as a tumulus of human experi- ence over six or seven generations. Would that be replaceable?

During the Eighties, the Trust had been attacked for living in a fantasised past, cre- ating a cult of the patrician house that cele- brated social values inimical to a modern society. An expensive failure at Uppark would invite derision. If you believed that the Trust had been hijacked by a coterie of infatuated Whig wannabees, then the news that they were proposing to spend £20 mil- lion copying one of the erotic objects of their desire would be unlikely to please you.

The idea of a modern replacement sounded progressive. Over the centuries private owners often rebuilt or redesigned their homes in contemporary styles. But the Trust exists to preserve, not to go into the upmarket property business. And what sort of architecture would emerge? The financiers and fortune-hunters and political fixers who built the great English houses were an adventurous breed. The Trust's managers are, very properly, scholarly bureaucrats. We know what such commit- tees go for: the bloodless revivalism of the Quinlan Terry villas built by the Crown Estate Commissioners in the north-west corner of Regent's Park and of the new Gothic chapel and octagonal vestibule at Windsor favoured by the Prince of Wales's committee. Wisely, the Trust decided to go ahead with restoration at Uppark.

The result, astonishingly, is a triumph. To the non-specialist eye at least, most of the new work looks well wrought and a good match. The art of freehand modelling rococo reliefs on lime-plaster ceilings had been lost. Trevor Proudfoot, whose conser- vation firm occupies a cluster of huts behind the tennis courts at Cliveden, hired eight young sculptors to replicate what had been destroyed, using surviving fragments as models. Their work is crisp, bold and vivacious, faithful to the original yet never falling into dead pastiche. Roughly a third of one of the beautiful carved wood pier- glass frames had been burned to a cinder. The replaced sections, carved by Christine Palmer, are virtually indistinguishable. The lead glass chandeliers have been reconsti- tuted from undamaged pieces and from new sections blown at Dartington and then cut to match.

These successes do not please everyone. Good conservation practice requires that repairs be visible in the interests of sound scholarship. The Trust argues that, while this holds true for museum or saleroom objects, concealment is allowable in a large decorative scheme whose effect would oth- erwise be diminished. There are also rival schools of thought about whether a build- ing should be restored to its pristine state (like the Residenz at Wurzburg, a blitzed rococo palace now stupefyingly re-created to look as it did when built) or artificially aged. At Uppark the Trust has preferred a confessedly bogus patination to avoid glar- ing contrasts of old and new.

In any ambitious restoration there is a tension between stabilising a house at a sin- gle moment and treating it as a palimpsest of the family's history. Where it is an important setpiece, like Hurlington's Chiswick House or Gerrit Rietveld's De Stijl masterpiece, the Schroder House in Utrecht, there is really no argument. You strip out the accretions to restore the archi- tect's vision. Where the main interest is human, as at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, a Baroque house filled with the eclectic acquisitions of a family that couldn't bear to throw anything away, the Trust has left the contents undisturbed to tell their story. There is a third alternative. At Hetloo, the country seat of the House of Orange, the Dutch have restored different rooms to dif- ferent periods. But that subverts its identity as a house, turning it into a museum.

The Trust has sometimes been accused of being too finicky, most recently by Lord Scarsdale who has complained that, at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, its managers have carted away some of his family posses- sions thought to clash with the Adam inte- riors. But its general rule is undogmatic: to keep the house as it was when the owners handed it over. That is what it is doing at the Erno Goldfinger House in Hampstead, which will be opened to the public next year. In the half-century Goldfinger lived there, the spartan interiors (bare boards and tubular steel) were gradually compro- mised by improvisation and by the pres- ence of those enemies of uncluttered minimalism, small children. It will be left unchanged.

And that is what the Trust has done at Uppark. Its unpaid custodians, who know the house well, seem unanimous that the spirit of the place has survived the conser- vators' illusionism.