C O N T E X T 1 2 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 2 15 Sarah Kay The Octagon Room at Attingham Park The re-creation of the Octagon Room at Attingham Park restores a sense of Regency opulence and extravagance, and illustrates that important layer of the house’s history. The ambitious, long-term project called ‘Attingham Re-discovered’ is now into its seventh year of reviving the historic interiors at Attingham Park, a late Georgian mansion with Regency interiors in Shropshire, owned by the National Trust. The project’s programme is founded on years of extensive archival and technical research. The resulting work ranges from stabilisation and conservation to restoration of whole decorative and furnishing schemes. Built for the first Lord Berwick by the Scottish architect George Steuart in 1785 and altered by the Regency architect John Nash in 1805–7, Attingham Park in Shropshire is a vast, austere, late-Georgian mansion. Like most historic houses,Attingham’s fortunes have risen and fallen. The house has had extravagant expenditure lavished on it, survived periods of decline, neglect and even bankruptcy, and has each time been revived and resuscitated. It was bequeathed to the NationalTrust in 1947 by the eighth and last Lord Berwick. Until quite recently visitors were only able to see a comparatively small proportion of its rooms. Many of those that were shown had become rather soulless, sterile and institutionalised, and had lost a convincing feel of ever having been lived in. Greater visitor expectations and increasing transparency in the way the NationalTrust shows and explains its properties to visitors made it necessary to refresh the way in which the interiors were presented. In 2006 the Attingham Re-discovered project set out to meet this challenge. One of the most exciting and chapters in its story has been the re-creation of a dramatic decorative scheme in the Octagon Room, Lord Berwick’s study. The room as it stood was a shabby shadow of what it once had been, in pale, almost wishy-washy greens and creams. There was a lingering institutional feel from when it had served as the Warden’s office of an (albeit influential) adult education college in the mid-20th century. This belied the inherent drama of the architecture and the impact of the room’s Regency decorative scheme, whose defining feature, it transpired, was a stunning and bold paint effect. It comprised red graining on a black ground, representing an exotic hardwood, on all the architectural joinery elements of the room: dado rail, skirting, pilasters, door entablatures and bookcase architraves. This powerful statement was offset by at least five shades of grey on the walls and entablature, combined with delicate plasterwork on the domed ceiling, consisting of arabesques, swirling foliage and putti holding garlands of flowers, picked out in intricate and subtly different creams and off-whites. Over five years worth of investigation and analysis¹ demonstrated that this striking paint scheme was intrinsically linked to the extravagant second Lord Berwick in 1812–13. He overhauled the suite of library rooms on the west side of the house, comprising the Inner Library, The re-created paint scheme combined with re-created carpet and curtains, and showing a trial for the pink silk lining of the cupboards (Photo: DerekWilbraham)
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