A new house in the Jacobean-style that oozes comfort

Near the site of a Sussex country house demolished in 1911, Richard Taylor and Rick Englert have built a Jacobean-style manor at Whithurst Park

It was about 25 years between Richard Taylor's initial offer to buy the land adjacent to his own in West Sussex and the family that lived there finally acquiescing. Richard had been farming in the area for many years and long coveted Whithurst Park, with its 100 or so acres of wild meadows, ancient pastures and towering Sussex pines. In the spring of 1999, it was his, and he and his partner Rick Englert had big plans.

Although a once fine house - perhaps dating from sixteenth century - had stood at Whithurst, it was torn down in 1911. The family from whom Richard bought the land had lived in a small cottage that they had built shortly after buying the plot in the Thirties. This is where Richard and Rick, who also have a home in London, lived part-time while embarking on their first project at Whithurst: the construction of a very modern lodge designed by the architect James Gorst (featured in House & Garden in April 2003). When the lodge was completed, the Thirties cottage was demolished, apart from the potting shed wing, which is now part of the garden.

It should be noted that Richard and Rick have wildly different tastes. The former grew up in grand houses, including Cricket House in Somerset, and has relatively traditional tastes. Rick, who was born in Texas and raised in Connecticut, and who studied architecture before moving to Florida, is of a decidedly more modern bent. Perhaps the lodge was meant to appease Rick, because the next house they built, Whithurst House, looks as though it has stepped out of a Nikolaus Pevsner volume on historic buildings. 'I didn't have much to say about this one,' Rick says with a laugh. 'I wanted to design an off-the-grid eco house.'

The couple turned to their great friend Kit Rae-Scott to help them design the house. In their brief, they described the elements they wanted: a house with a drawing room on an upper floor for taking in the view, a floor beneath where they would spend most of their time, and a ground floor and wings for services and staff. It was Kit's idea to turn back the architectural clock. Noting that the arrangement was reminiscent of houses from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, he soon came back with detailed drawings of a substantial building in a Jacobean style. Whithurst would once again have its big house.

It took a year to get planning permission and two more to build. The result is certainly striking and bears some of the signatures of the prodigy houses built in the era that its design evokes, such as Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire and Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. But as Kit explains, 'It was the site itself and essence of Sussexness that made me design it as I did.' Faced with locally handmade bricks, the house is tall and symmetrical, relatively square in footprint and with tower pavilions. With almost no superfluous ornamentation, it is a sober looking building, falling somewhere between plain and handsome.

'The concept is that the wings at the front of the house could have once been stables and then were abandoned, disused and turned into garages,' Rick says. 'It feels convincing.' Richard is more effusive: 'Kit is a complete genius and has such a passion for historic buildings. He can not only describe every great house in England, but could also probably draw the floor plans for each one by hand.' That is how he designed Whithurst House, which is over 1,000 square metres including six bedrooms and five bathrooms. All of the details - on the windows, for example - were drawn full scale.