Building record YOX 045 - Grove Park

Grove Park is a substantial grade II-listed country house set in a park of approximately 35 acres to the south of the village of Yoxford. In its present form it was built during the 1770s for Eleazar Davy, who had risen from relatively humble beginnings to serve as High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1770 when he was living at nearby Ubbeston Hall. As the son-in-law of Lord Carbery and father-in-law of Sir John Rouse of Henham Hall his social connections in the County were impeccable, and his new house reflects the latest fashion of the day. The principal architect is uncertain but James Wyatt, the rival of Robert Adam who designed the interior of Heveningham Hall, is known to have been involved. The brick walls incorporate much fabric from a smaller but still substantial 16th or 17th century predecessor owned in 1736 by a Mr Clutterbuck, but the various straight joints and other anomalies were originally disguised by stucco which was removed in the 20th century. The kitchen wing on the north, which has been much enlarged, is described by Pevsner as an Elizabethan timber-framed structure but there is absolutely no evidence of this – although its ground-floor fabric is likely to pre-date the 1770s. In 1803 the property passed to Eleazar’s nephew David Elisha Davy, the well-known Suffolk antiquarian whose extensive manuscript collection in the British Library includes a remarkably detailed plan of the house dated 1780 and an image of the exterior in 1807. The building was leased to Lord Manners for much of the first half of the 19th century and then stood empty for many years before it was sold in circa 1865 to Thomas Lomax (a wealthy barrister), whose descendants retained it until 1935. From the 1970s it was the home of the late Sir Paul Newall who served as Lord Major of London in 1993.
While the building survives essentially as remodelled for Eleazar Davy, retaining numerous original features such as a fine staircase and many Adams-style fire surrounds and cornices, it has not escaped alteration. These changes can be documented with reference to the plans of 1780 and circa 1865 with a degree of detail that is rarely possible. The modern dining room adjoining the kitchen to the north of the entrance was initially a library and the original dining room lay as far from the kitchen as possible to the rear of the southern wing (in order to avoid the noise and smells generated by servants). The butler was provided with a heated pantry and a bedroom in a lean-to immediately behind the dining room that had already been extended by 1865. The most dramatic alterations were undertaken on the arrival of Thomas Lomax who was credited with ‘restoring and much improving’ the mansion and laying out new gardens in White’s Suffolk Directory for 1874. He largely rebuilt and added a third storey to the kitchen wing, and demolished the original service sheds which formed a large rear yard to create a smaller courtyard garden defined by a new white-brick range in the Italianate style. He inserted a new garden door in the middle of the southern elevation, enlarged the main entrance hall and inserted an enclosed porch between the front door and the open portico shown in 1807. He was also responsible for changing the property’s name from Grove House to Grove Park, and for the extensive heated greenhouses that survive in the original walled garden to the north. Much more information about the building’s origins and contents is likely to be uncovered with further research in the Davy manuscripts.