Top: the steps which lead down from the entrance pavilion to the dining room were modelled on those of Villa Malaparte on Capri which famously featured in Jean-Luc Godardâs 1963
film Contempt. Above: the floor tiles in the kitchen are early 19th-century Sicilian while the pineapple lamps on the far wall were designed by Baccarat in the 1970s for a St-Tropez
nightclub. Opposite: in contrast to the contemporary table the grandfather clock dates from 1680. It was made by London clockmaker John Ebsworth and still contains its original weights
AS I BEGAN to climb the southwest-facing escarpment of
the Oxfordshire Chilterns a red kite appeared from nowhere and
hovered on an updraught perfectly still but for its quivering wing
tips. When I mentioned this to the owner of The Bluff a few min-
utes later he smiled in recognition of my delight. âThey often watch
over me when Iâm swimming in the poolâ he says. âWe may be only
50 minutesâ drive from London but itâs another world here.â
Itâs a world acknowledged as an area of outstanding natural
beauty high above the rolling farmland around High Wycombe
on a chalk ridge that provides a sudden challenge to cyclists after
miles of spinning. From the top says architect Carl Pickering
the Australian half of Rome-based practice Lazzarini Pickering
âThereâs so much view you have to frame it.â
The Bluff was designed as just that frame.
Pickering calls the unrepentantly contem-
porary house he created with his studio part-
ner Claudio Lazzarini as âa viewing point for
nature a perfect refuge from which to take
in natural phenomena: you feel like youâre
outside but youâre warm and you have a cup
of tea in your hand.â The client a globetrot-
ting Australian businessman and collector
concurs: âThis is a wonderful house to be in
when itâs wild outside... you sit there and
watch the fronts rolling in.â
It wasnât always thus. Until a few years
ago there was another house here an un-
remarkable 1920s stone affair that literally
turned its back on that great sweep of land
down below. To compound matters adds
Pickering âthey kept planting hedges against the prevailing winds- so in the end they must have forgotten what the view looked like.â
Remarkably Oxfordshire planners with a feel for the audacity
and low environmental impact of the project gave permission for
the house which the present owner had bought in the 1980s to be
torn down and replaced by a glass-and-steel structure built into
the hillside just where the land starts to fall away. It develops along
two long axes which when seen from above are hinged a short
way down their sides like an eccentric A.
None of this is visible when you enter the gates and choosing
your direction (left or right? clockwise or anti?) scrunch around
the gravel of an oval drive fringed by box hedges that enclose a
lawn. Here I later learn the original house
once stood. The only structure on view is the
entrance pavilion â a dark cube of steel and
glass backed by topiary arches that spring
playfully around each side of the uncommu-
nicative box softening its Modernist edges
and parsing the landscape into the manage-
able dimensions of a fresco in a Renaissance
loggia. A lovely weathered 1824 Coade copy
of a Medici vase inside the pavilion nods at
the English country-house tradition that
argues Pickering the Bluff House project
respects far more than any Neo- Geor gian
mansion: âWith its differently framed views
and interest in antiquity itâs a third-millen-
nium interpretation of that tradition.â
The rest of the house is accessed from the
entrance portal via a trapezoidal flight of