Decimus Burton would be much in demand among the country-estate set today. The 19th-century architect who elevated central London parks to their classical splendour with lodges, gates and arches is best remembered for his spectacular Temperate House at Kew Gardens. A century and a half later, his virtuoso feat of precision engineering continues to inspire architects and landscapers.
In the private parklands and gardens of country houses, such grand hothouses are, well, hot all over again. Whether it’s to cultivate rare palm trees, to create a glittering edifice in which to party or to be self-sufficient in San Marzano tomatoes, a glasshouse is the home improvement to build now. And we are not talking off-the-peg greenhouses, but ambitious designs that would turn a Victorian head gardener green with envy.
People who commission custom glasshouses, according to Chris Sawyer of the greenhouse design company Alitex, want to entertain in all weathers. “Traditionally, our customers fell into two camps: avid gardeners or those with country estates who knew that a beautifully designed, Victorian-inspired greenhouse would enhance their property,” he says. “Recently, though, we have seen customers increasingly looking to use their structures for purposes other than plants. One owner of a greenhouse [19m in length, and costing £250,000] has used his for socially distanced classical music concerts.” Customers in the New Forest, he adds, are installing a glasshouse around their outdoor infinity pool, “so that it can be enjoyed come rain or shine”.
Inquiries about greenhouses costing upwards of £40,000 have more than doubled, according to Lisa Morton, the director at Vale Garden Houses. Most of them, she adds, are designed to expand living space rather than house plants – “and become the most-used room in the home”. Her company’s speciality is a show-stopping orangery, a design that has been popular since the 17th century for growing fruit against a south-facing wall but now often features a marble-top bar lit by a crystal chandelier.
Many recent commissions, Morton says, have been inspired by restaurant nostalgia. When we couldn’t eat out we fantasised about trips to restaurants whose produce is often picked from their glasshouses that morning. At Lime Wood in Hampshire, for instance, a private dining table for 12 is set around the trunk of an olive tree in an Alitex greenhouse where the herbs are grown. At Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Hartley Botanic built a smart Victorian-style greenhouse to use as a hub for the hotel’s gardening school.
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Tom Barry, the chief executive of Hartley Botanic, has noted a new passion for “spade-to-fork” eating among his customers, who previously wouldn’t have dreamt of getting their hands dirty. About a third of them, he says, cite “growing their own” as the primary reason they wanted to invest in a glasshouse.
Although, not everyone wants a traditional model. Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, for instance, features giant glass spheres that house 40,000 rainforest plants alongside a staff cafeteria. At Woolbeding Gardens in West Sussex, Thomas Heatherwick is completing a greenhouse that’s more Crystal Maze than Crystal Palace: a ten-sided kinetic glasshouse that will be filled with plants more commonly found along the Silk Route. When it opens to the public next spring, perhaps it will inspire a glut of copycat contemporary hothouses.
In the meantime, the Victorian vibe is the most popular style in the UK and across the Atlantic. One particularly beautiful palm house, complete with cupola and finials, was recently created by Tanglewood for a private estate in the Great Lakes region, near Chicago, and was specifically designed to mimic Kew. “We are obsessed with the Palm House at Kew and with Decimus Burton and Richard Turner and Joseph Paxton [the 19th-century masters of glass in architecture]. They were on the cutting edge of technology at the time,” says Alan Stein, Tanglewood’s president.
Even now, Stein adds, “building a space out of glass – one of these fanciful, whimsical, ethereal buildings – still requires a lot of special knowledge and expertise”. Although when they built Kew, he adds, “they had huge boilers, used coal like crazy and were massive polluters. Now there is low-emissivity, energy-efficient glass and thermal-break technology.”
The Chicago showpiece, which cost tens of millions of dollars, does contain palm trees but, like many others, its primary purpose is not botanical. “I don’t think the owner does much gardening,” Stein says. “She just loves the environment. She has a large circle of friends and family, and two weeks after we finished it, she had a wedding in there. Also, she likes to go in there and read. She gets to escape the Midwest winters and feel like she is in the tropics.”
alitex.co.uk; valegardenhouses.co.uk, hartley-botanic.co.uk
