Westbury House
A contemporary English country house set within the South Downs National Park, Westbury House is a 36,000-square-foot new-build home comprising extensive bedroom suites, substantial formal and informal living spaces, associated landscape gardens, an underground car park, piano nobile, and spa facilities. Westbury House revives a legacy of the English country home.
Westbury House is the creation of a substantial new country house that re-establishes this historic estate through the enduring legacy of the English country house tradition. Set on the edge of the Meon River within the South Downs National Park, the new house replaces a dilapidated existing residence with a modern multi-generational home conceived in the neo-classical Palladian tradition. Drawing on the principles that shaped England’s great country estates, symmetry, hierarchy, and measured proportion, the design integrates the Golden Ratio throughout, creating a composition that unites architecture, landscape, and history in a contemporary expression of permanence and order.
Replacing a poorly extended later structure that succeeded the original Palladian house lost to fire in the early twentieth century, the scheme restores both architectural dignity and historic continuity. By reinstating key elements of the Bridgeman landscape and re-centring the house on its original grand axis, the project reconnects Westbury House to the formal planning traditions of England’s great landed estates, where house and landscape were conceived as one harmonious whole. Providing 36,000 square feet of accommodation including a substantial underground car park, piano nobile, and spa facilities the house reinterprets the classical ideals of the English country seat for modern family life, balancing heritage, stewardship, and contemporary living.
The façade is structured around classical proportional systems, with the dashed overlay revealing the use of the golden ratio and harmonic geometric divisions to guide the composition. Interlocking circles, rectangles, and proportional grids echo Renaissance and Palladian principles, creating a sense of order, symmetry, and visual balance. The central axis establishes hierarchy and formality, while repeated bays and carefully scaled openings reinforce rhythm across the elevation. These classical geometric rules are translated into a contemporary language through clean lines, expansive glazing, and minimal detailing, allowing timeless architectural mathematics to shape a modern English country house.
Arrival unfolds through a grand internal courtyard, where broad stone steps rise toward a serene entrance framed by colonnades and warm timber. At its heart, a single sculptural tree anchors the composition an elegant reinterpretation of the English classical estate, where symmetry, landscape, and quiet grandeur define the home’s first impression.
