newsfromgloucestershire201201

"Blow ... houses are solid and substantial and intentionally lacking in meretricious brilliance; their quality lies in the use of the best materials worked in the best possible way. Blow was an innocent. A lovable, fastidious personality and a joy in simple things permeate his own house, Hilles, in Gloucestershire. Thrust up on a bastion because of sloping ground, the house looks at though it grew out of the soil. Begun in 1914, it was built on a site chosen for its spectacular views of rolling countryside and woods, but the house was not orientated to take advantage of the view. In Elizabethan fashion, it turns its shoulder to the panorama, only casting a backward glance, so to speak, through a comparatively small number of not very large windows. On the ground floor, only a bay at the end of the Long Room looks out on this side. Hilles was built in stages; but even allowing for this, it does not seek to make a triumphant, unified impression. The broad window bay which goes up above the thatched eaves of the roof is disproportionately big, fitted to need rather than to conventional notions of architecture. The rooms - with their Mortlake tapestries, their panelling, their seventeenth-century furniture - are not without a sense of grandeur; but equally the stone flags of the hall, the elm floorboards and ceilings throughout the houses, the plainness and solidity of the architecture, and the simplified mouldings of the windows and fireplaces suggest a relish for the natural qualities of materials unadorned. The way the life of the house was organised, socially and domestically, completed the aesthetic whole."

in ... p. 244-5