There is buying a property that needs work, then meticulously renovating, refurbishing, repairing and replacing every last feature in a nine-year project of dedication and relentless attention to detail.
Similarly, there is being interested in the history of your home, then there are the owners of the same property near Kendal who have gone considerably further to find out and record its past for future generations.
Summerlands Hall is the beneficiary of this devotion to both research and restoration by owners who have returned the once grand residence into a unique, nine-bedroom home that honours those who created and enhanced it during the Victorian era.
The hall was built in 1846 for John Harrison, a cotton mill owner and paper manufacturer from Bury, and his wife Eliza, at a cost of £8,500 (around £1.2m today). John was a JP for Westmorland and 1881 was listed as county magistrate. He also had a strong interest in the Bank of Westmorland.
Crucially, his home was designed by George Webster, the most important architect in the area in the mid-19th century.
Based in Kendal, Webster worked prolifically in Cumbria, Lancashire and West and North Yorkshire designing new houses and civic buildings and remodelling older houses and churches in a career that spanned 45 years up to around 1859.
His projects included Kendal Town Hall, Belsfield, at Bowness-on-Windermere, multiple churches including those at Bardsea, Cleator, Grayrigg and Firbank, and the former TSB bank in Ulverston. He remodelled Dallam Tower and Hutton-in-the-Forest and, among other high profile works, designed Conishead Priory and Holker Hall’s Jacobean style rebuild in the late 1830s.
Webster’s early design style was Neoclassical before he pioneered Tudor Revival then went through a phase of incorporating Italianate features into his designs before moving into Gothic Revival.
It is this period in which he created Summerlands Hall, a gentrified country house with stables and ancillary buildings set in 55 acres of land, formal gardens and the only hard tennis court in the district at the time.
The property’s location may have been chosen for its close proximity to Oxenholme station, which opened as Kendal Junction in 1847, and would have been very much in its favour to future purchasers, just as today it is easily accessible from the M6.
Aged 44 when he and his family moved in, John Harrison, who commissioned Webster, clearly wanted the property to reflect his success so the building had a tower, a spectacular reception hall, vast rooms – those facing the front and gardens with large scale bay windows – and elegant fireplaces, evidently the creation of Webster’s father Francis.
The Webster family had been masons and marble polishers. Born in 1767, Francis arrived in Kendal 20 years later and, having moved into designing houses by the end of the century, is credited with bringing the profession of architecture to the town.
A plaque on the tower chimney inscribed H J E stands for Harrison John Eliza.
On realising the importance of Summerlands to the history of the area, bridge engineer Paul set about investigating more about the property he and his wife bought as a family home in 2015.
“We’d wanted to move closer to the Lakes and were interested in the Georgian period and anything Gothic. All the contents from our previous houses complemented this house too, being Gothic in design and befitting a hall like Summerlands. It also needed work, and I wanted to rescue it.
“We were given snippets of its history but some of it didn’t add up so about a year in I started researching the history myself.”
It took two years of trips to the library and district archives, as well as scouring books and the internet. It led to Paul writing a book on the history of Summerlands, which also documents all the work the couple has done to the hall, everything they uncovered in the process and its restoration, preserved in a leather-bound tome.
“The book took three years, but I thought it was important that the house was documented to keep the history safe and hopefully deter other people from painting the walls magnolia, lowering the ceilings and pulling off all the panelling, which had been done in the 1970s and was pretty much how it was when we bought it,” explains Paul.
“We’ve painstakingly taken it apart and put it all back together as it was originally, or at least as close as we can based on old photographs.”
His attention to detail went as far as using a penknife to scrape off decades of paint to get through to the very first wall coverings, scanning them and having exact match reproductions made.
The Harrisons lived at Summerlands until 1884 when the house and estate was sold to Henry Miles Radcliffe, another cotton mill owner, in 1891. Henry raised the property’s interior to another level, extending it with a very large billiard room, monogrammed stained glass to every room and the addition of more spectacular marble fireplaces.
Radcliffe was Lancastrian with mills in Oldham, his wife Eva from Yorkshire, a union that is reflected in opulent, plaster ceilings throughout the property, the best of which is in the sitting room. The room is an homage to the couple, with the initial R, crests and more red and white roses in elaborate stained glass doors at the entrance to the room, with the roots of their wealth – cotton plants – created in stained glass in the large bay windows.
Old photographs show Victorian ladies promenading in the garden under parasols, and Radcliffe’s own funeral cortege with eight horses and a carriage lined up outside the front door before his coffin was taken to Crosscrake Church for the service and burial.
Radcliffe had just one son, Captain Miles Radcliffe, who was in the Border Regiment and, according to records, was shot through the heart on the Western Front at Ypres on December 12, 1914, aged 31. He apparently had a baby son, Miles Claude, but Paul’s research shows Summerlands’ next owner was Edmund Ashworth, a hat manufacturer from Bury, who acquired it in 1937.
At the end of the Second World War the hall became a convalescent home for the Liverpool Mission to Seamen. In 1945, the stables were being used as workshops where men from the merchant and allied marines could learn trades. Paul has discovered that 2,000 naval officers passed through and 36 were accommodated at the property.
After the war the hall was empty for a time and at risk of dereliction. In 1978 it was sold by auction to Windermere Estates and divided into three separate homes by blocking up arches, doorways and fireplaces: the hall, the tower and the court, which was created from the old servants’ quarters. Paul and Samatha acquired the tower two years ago and immediately removed the false walls to reincorporate it back into the main hall making the spaces flow more freely and as they were intended. The court was originally the servants’ quarters, which remains as a separate dwelling.
The whole renovation has taken nine years, beginning with some necessary work replacing trusses, and means the building is structurally sound. They have restored all the windows, repaired the stained glass, reinstated missing period fireplaces and replaced missing panelling. The best example of this is the dining room, which also has an elegant plaster ceiling.
“I found a book, The Websters of Kendal, and in it was a tiny photograph of the fireplace in this room and you could just see the panelling to the side of it,” explains Paul. “I had it scaled up as per the original dimensions, made then reinstated it.”
He believes the room may have been designed as a library to which the gentlemen would have retreated since there is poetry referencing the arts and science in the stained glass windows, and another poem about smoking.
It is all a long way from the 1980s carpet and wall-mounted plasma TV the couple took on when they bought it. “Webster must have been spinning in his grave,” laughs Paul.
The use of oak in panelling and parquet flooring is extensive, and Paul has repaired, sanded and oiled all the floors.
No expense has been spared in the décor either. On the main landing, Paul took the colour of the walls – having scraped back to find the original – and had it and a motif from the oak staircase incorporated into a bespoke design for the carpet runners.
Wallpapers have been selected to be in keeping with the period and the scale of the rooms has enabled them to really go to town with the designs: a deep blue flock in the master bedroom, a beautiful pale peach bird design in the sitting room. There is De Gournay hand-painted silk wallpaper while others are by Watts 1874, inspired by or based upon palaces and grand houses of the mid-1800s designed by A W Pugin. “The colours were chosen for us and mean that we couldn’t get any closer to how it would have looked when first built and decorated,” says Paul.
The Wedgwood-style cameos above the picture rail in the master bedroom are actually a 1960s addition but work well with their gold painted swags that complement the extravagant velvet curtains. Equally indulgent is the huge bathroom, set within the three-storey Victorian water tower, with its black and gold lion design wallpaper and freestanding claw foot bath.
Heating a large home is never easy so they invested in two new commercial scale boilers and installed reclaimed cast iron radiators in every room.
Radcliffe’s 1891 extension is a particularly vast space, which Paul believes was a billiards room with gentlemen’s pipe smoke drawn up to the high lantern ceiling.
Other principal features of the room is the William de Morgan tiled fireplace with carved oak mantle and stained glass windows. The six-foot wide, crystal chandelier was made especially for the space and can be lowered for cleaning thanks to an electric mechanism.
The entrance hallway as it is today is opulent by any standards yet a doorway once led through to a further reception space with a large fireplace with the welcome engraving: When Friends Meet Hearts Warm. It has church-esque proportions beneath the galleried landing and atrium above, perhaps not surprising when you learn that Webster worked with Lancaster architects Sharpe, Paley and Austin, who specialised in working on ecclesiastical buildings.
“We had scaffolding up in here for a year and a half, it was awful really,” says Paul. Its restoration is something of a masterpiece, right down to the newel post finials he had made to finish off the grand staircase and replacing some of the lost gold plaques high in the ceiling which he had specially cast from the originals.
Later features also survive, such as the row of servants’ bells in the kitchen, and the number of rooms mean modern desires can be met, such as his and hers dressing rooms.
“Once I had got half-way through the restoration I wouldn’t allow myself to stop otherwise all the time I had spent on it to that point would have been a waste of my life,” he says. “I did get rather obsessed with George Webster. One morning I woke up at 3am and went on to eBay, my usual place for searching for things. Normally there was nothing, but that day Webster’s own private bible was on there, so of course I bought it. It was unbelievable really. It felt like George was saying “thank you for saving my masterpiece and for being so diligent”, and I’d like to think that he would be happy with the results.”
The 1835 bible – with the title Eller How, which was the Webster family home at Grange-over-Sands – now has pride of place in a glass cabinet.
Whether it stays with the hall, which is now on the market, or goes with Paul may be up for negotiation. Today, Summerlands comes with secure gated parking, a five-car garage and a range of outbuildings within 13 acres. A spokesperson for estate agent Hackney & Leigh says: “Summerlands Hall is not just a home; it’s a testament to the dedication and vision of its current owners.
Their commitment to preserving the hall’s history and architectural significance shines through in every detail. With its rich heritage, breath-taking architecture, and idyllic setting it offers a truly extraordinary living experience.”
After devoting recent years to the hall, Paul admits he is nervous about selling it and hopes a future owner will take it to their hearts as he and Samantha have. He adds: “We will never find another house like it.”
![Cookham Barns 1925, Gilbert Spencer, Abbot Hall [credit Liss Llewellyn]](/resources/images/128x89/1x/17938067.jpg)
![Cookham Barns 1925, Gilbert Spencer, Abbot Hall [credit Liss Llewellyn]](/resources/images/180x180/1x/17938067.jpg)
