Arlington Court is a neoclassical style country house built 1820–23, situated in the parish of Arlington, next to the parish church of St James, miles NE of Barnstaple, north Devon, England. It is a Grade II* listed building. The park and gardens are Grade II* registered on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
The house was commissioned by Colonel John Palmer Chichester (1769-1823) to the design of the North Devon architect Thomas Lee, replacing the earlier Georgian house of about 1790, built on a different site and demolished, designed by John Meadows. Arlington Court was considerably expanded in 1865 by John Palmer Chichester's grandson, Sir Alexander Palmer Bruce Chichester, 2nd Baronet (1842-1881), son of Sir John Palmer Bruce Chichester, 1st Baronet (d.1851). In 1873 according to the Return of Owners of Land, 1873 the Arlington estate comprised about 5,300 acres.
Sir Bruce's unmarried daughter and heiress, Rosalie Chichester (d. 1949), donated the mansion to the National Trust together with two years before her death in 1949.
Today, the house, together with the Chichester family's collection of antique furniture and an eclectic collection of family memorabilia, is fully open to the public.
Architecture
The architecture of the house, a severe neoclassical style, which in many ways resembles the architecture made popular in the early 19th century by Sir John Soane, under whom Arlington's architect Thomas Lee trained. Often mistakenly likened to the slightly more flamboyant Greek Revival architecture, the style confines most ornament to the interior of the house, leaving the symmetrical exterior almost unadorned and chaste, relying only on window and door apertures and shallow recesses and apses and the occasional pilaster to relieve the austerity of the facade; at Arlington, this is seen in the shallow twin pilasters terminating the two principal façades, the lack of either aprons or pediments to the windows and, in place of the near conventional classical entrance portico of the era, is a single-story, semi-circular pillared porch. The simplicity of the design is further accentuated by a low, unpierced parapet concealing the roof-line from view; thus giving the building a low, box-like appearance.
From completion, the house remained largely unaltered until the 1860s, when the house was almost doubled in size by Sir Alexander Bruce Chichester, who added the large domestic wing (rooms 9 to 16 on plan) in which to house the servants and provide the extended domestic offices which were considered necessary during the Victorian era. Following the invention of the bell pull, a convenient device which negated the need for servants to be constantly within calling distance of the main house, servants began to be housed in a designated wing; thus affording their employers greater privacy.
Sir Alexander (a man of extravagant tastes, whose expenditure was to ultimately bring the family to the point of financial ruin) also created the large, central staircase hall (marked 1 on the plan); this was achieved by combining several smaller rooms on the ground and upper floors. The style of the hall, that of a Renaissance courtyard, overlooked by a gallery reached from an imposing staircase was a fashionable country house feature of the time – providing a common assembly area for house-guests and a convenient space to display works of art and curiosities; similar halls can be seen at Highclere Castle, Mentmore Towers and Halton House. Often known as lounge halls, they were usually furnished as with comfortable chairs and sofas and often a grand piano. Contemporary pictures show that this was the case at Arlington too. The hall is dominated by an enormous imperial staircase rising to the gallery above. The stairs are lit by an internal window displaying the various Chichester arms from 1505 to 1865.
The principal reception rooms of the house are arranged as an enfilade; folding screens concealed by scagliola ionic columns permits the enfilade to be transformed into a tripartite gallery seventy feet long. Originally conceived as a drawing room (5), ante room (4) and dining room (3), the dining room was transformed into a morning room during the alterations of the 1860s. Architecturally, the most interesting of the rooms is the ante room. A cube room, it has a saucer dome, segmental arches and inset pier glasses, all in the style of Soane, whose pupil, Lee, was responsible for the house.