Making a mockery
News that the Government is to discourage fake historical architecture is enough to send most footballers - and their wives - running for the cover of their mock-Tudor beams.
The Evening Standard revealed yesterday how planning guidance for country houses has been drawn up to encourage the creation of "truly outstanding" modern homes, rather than contemporary pastiches of period styles.
Today an architecture expert looks at four prominent country homes to see what horrors the new guidelines could have prevented.
Marcus Fairs, editor of architecture and design magazine icon, singles out the "feeble classical grandeur" of brick columns at the Duke and Duchess of York's Sunninghill Park, which he describes as a "Barratt home on steroids".
He is also dismayed by the " Travelodge" porch at Wayne Rooney's "pub vernacular" residence and the "try-hard" pool extension at Beckingham Palace.
As for Nicholas van Hoogstraten's "monument to megalomania", Hamilton Palace, Fairs feels it should have been prevented altogether.
While they could spare us such eyesores, the guidelines could be self-defeating, says Mark Charter, director of country house agency Carter Jonas in Oxford. "If classical designs are rejected, people will buy an existing country house. The result will be a reduction in the number of houses being built."
