Bob and the Home Again crew spent a glorious afternoon touring Agecroft Hall, an authentic half-timbered Tudor manor house originally built in Lancashire, England in the late 15th century. For centuries the home of distinguished English families, Agecroft Hall fell into disrepair by the end of the 19th century. During the 1920s wealthy American Anglophiles, wishing to imbue their lives with the flavor of England's landed gentry, began buying up these timeworn treasures--along with heirlooms, armor, and period antiques--and shipping them back to the States for reassembly.
Agecroft Hall was purchased at auction in 1925 by Richmonder Thomas C. Williams, Jr., dismantled, crated, and transported across the Atlantic and then painstakingly re-erected in a Richmond neighborhood known as Windsor Farms where it now sits overlooking the James River. Today Agecroft Hall with its exquisite antiques and opulent gardens is a beautiful house museum open to the public Tuesday through Sunday year-round.
Bob meets up with Agecroft Executive Director Richard Moxley at the wicket gate where guests, ducking to fit through the diminutive door, would be in peril if mistaken for unwelcome intruders. Through the gate and into the courtyard one is dazzled by the intricacies of the ornate "magpie" work with its quadrafoils and diapering on the house's facade.
Inside one finds a trove of fabulous Elizabethan and Jacobean furnishings and exceptional tapestries. In one bedroom is a rare bedstead of richly ornamented wood from the 17th century with the original paint still intact. A Mortlake tapestry depicting "the wolf hunt" which hangs in the Great Hall is just one of the many wonderful tapestries in Agecroft's collection. But as superb as the house is, it is the gardens that are Agecroft's crowning glory.
Designed by prominent Richmond landscape architect Charles Gillette, Agecroft's grounds mirror the richness, order and diversity of Reformation English gardens. The sunken garden, awash with the cacophony of thousands of tulips in full bloom (they plant 5,000 bulbs each year), was inspired by the pond garden at Henry the Eighth's Hampton Court Palace. The formal "garden rooms", designed with perfect bilateral symmetry, include an Elizabethan knot garden filled with herbs of the period, a collection of exotic plants recorded by John Tradescant the Younger in the 17th century, and a living exhibit of medicinal, flavoring, and aromatic plants.
For more information, visit the Agecroft Hall website.
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