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Writer's pictureDeborah Yaffe

Austen-linked teardown

Let us contemplate, for a moment, the kind of wealth that allows you to spend some £17 million ($22.8 million) on a palatial second home and then decide that the whole thing is a teardown.

 

Such is apparently the financial situation of the current owners of Ashe Park, a Hampshire estate that, in Jane Austen’s time, was the centerpiece of the village where Austen’s dear friend Anne Lefroy lived. Ashe Park figures in Austen’s letters: It was in the estate's main house that the 25-year-old novelist had an uncomfortable social experience she later described in a letter to her sister.

 

Two years ago, the Ashe Park estate—the 13,000-square-foot main house, plus assorted outbuildings, including a “party barn,” set on 235 acres of land—sold to overseas owners. Although the main house dates back to the sixteenth century, in the intervening years it has been repeatedly, and thoroughly, renovated, redesigned, repurposed, and rebuilt --and that’s the problem, according to the purchasers.

 

“The estate is tired and unmanaged,” they argue, in a planning application (viewable only from an EU IP address or via VPN) that was filed over the summer but began getting press attention much more recently. The many additions and piecemeal refurbishments have resulted in a main house “of poor architectural quality which no longer resembles the original country house built on the site,” application documents claim.

 

The best solution: tear down the house and some of its outbuildings and replace it with a new, larger Queen Anne-style mansion, complete with a separate wing for an indoor swimming pool. (Price tag: unspecified. But large, I assume.)

 

Despite its Austen associations, Ashe Park’s main house is not what the British call “listed”—its historical or architectural significance isn’t enough to give it legal protection against demolition. Nonetheless, more than a dozen local residents have registered their vociferous objections to both the destruction of the old house (so wasteful! So extravagant! Such a loss to history!) and the design of the new one (“a poorly detailed McMansion,” “a monstrous vanity project”).

 

Given the lack of a historic preservation order, the neighbors seem likely to lose this one, and, frankly, it’s hard to tell from online images how much we should regret the demise of Ashe Park’s main house, which apparently differs significantly from the place that Jane Austen visited. Is it a charmingly eclectic monument to architectural evolution, or a jerry-built mess that has outlived its usefulness? Could be either: Skillfully photographed to look its best in the real estate brochure of 2020, Ashe Park house is skillfully photographed to look its worst in the planning application (see p. 17, for example).


Many of us would have considered these issues before plunking down an eight-figure purchase price. But, then, we probably don't give our swimming pools their own wing.

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