A neo-classical idyll in the Sussex countryside with elegant interiors by Edward Bulmer

The area of Sussex around Midhurst holds many hidden valleys, combes and vistas which seem sometimes a little unreal – Tennyson celebrated the beauty of ‘green Sussex fading into blue’. Within this undulating landscape are timber-framed farmhouses, small stone manor houses and only a handful of really good Georgian country houses – and among the best of these is Pitshill.

Gloriously sited above the shallow bowl of a combe, the seven-bay classical pedimented house has a crisp elegance about it that would have pleased fussy eighteenth-century travellers, who loved nothing better than seeing a fine house and passing comment on the taste of the patron. In this case, they would have revelled in the recent achievement of the Hon Charles Pearson and his wife Lila, who have carried out what can only be called a model revival of a handsome Georgian house, creating an elegant, comfortable and convenient family house.

‘I had known the house as a child, as I was at school with Edwin, the youngest son of Sir Colville and Lady Barclay, who had bought it in the Fifties. I think I was captivated by it even then,’ says Charles. His own father, the 3rd Viscount Cowdray, had inherited the nearby Cowdray Estate, so this part of Sussex was already important to him. Charles bought the house in 1997 (‘with considerable trepidation’) and lived in a nearby farmhouse while he and Lila planned the restoration. Work on the house and garden began in earnest in 2010 and was completed in 2016.

‘The house was much loved but in a poor state when we bought it – isolated and pale, with a backdrop of holm oaks. It had a ghost-like feeling,’ Charles remembers. ‘I dreamt of creating a neo-classical idyll. The project was not without its difficulties, but it was a privilege to be able to work from almost a blank canvas.’

Pitshill has a complex story; it was built in the 1790s by William Mitford, who had approached Sir John Soane but rejected the architect’s proposed designs for an addition to the east front of the original gabled Jacobean house. Instead, Mitford resolved on an entirely new building. It appears this may have been partly to his own design, although he also made use of Soane’s ideas and collaborated with John Upton, the Petworth estate surveyor. Further work was done to the interiors in the 1830s.

In 1998, Charles engaged the architect Christopher Smallwood, who had been working at Goodwood House. Charles notes that the restoration ‘received great support from Historic England and the Chichester District Council – as well as our family’. Some big decisions had to be made along the way: ‘We had to take down the entire eastern façade, clean the stone and restore it. Happily, we saved 80 per cent of the original stone and renewed the rest, so you can’t tell the difference visually. We also re-used the original Coade stone balustrades and tympanum palmette decoration. The other elevations are rendered as before to match the Portland stone, but in a Keim paint that is similar to traditional lime wash but has greater longevity.’ The attic floor, which had been removed in the Fifties, was rebuilt within a new mansard roof containing four new bedrooms. For the front entrance on the western side of the house, Christopher designed a handsome porch with paired and fluted Doric columns in Portland stone.

From this entrance, you pass through the entrance hall, staircase hall and garden hall to reach the new formal garden to the east, which was designed by Simon Johnson. The view through the house continues from here across a wide lawn and terminates with the swimming pool and pedimented Tuscan-style pool pavilion. The lawn is framed by clipped holm oaks, which echo the old holm oaks in the landscape. Philip Thomason supplied new Coade stone balustrading for the house and for the lion-mask fountain north of the pavilion. This formal area close to the house fades into traditional English parkland and then into the landscape beyond.