For five years, architectural photographer Hélène Binet undertook a singular project to uncover some central truths and qualities around a specific building typology, and one which has previously not been subject to huge amounts of visual or written research. A University of Oxford research project, led by Professor Abigail Green and begun in 2015, set to rectify an identified knowledge gap in the history of Jewish Country Houses, a research project that has worked with the photographer to document a broad range of properties across Europe and the US.

A recent outcome of the research is a book, Jewish Country Houses, published by Profile Editions, each chapter featuring a text by an historian exploring the history, architecture, and characteristics of a selected house. It covers a range of properties including Hughenden Manor, Nymans, the Château de Ferrières, and Villa Kerylos, and Binet’s images help lift the publication beyond a traditional tome of architectural research, adding rich visual nuance.




“It had always been said that Jewish houses are kitsch, but this book is completely revisiting that concept,” Binet says, “the architecture came from a desire to assimilate and to define themselves part of a culture.” The photographer was speaking at the opening of an exhibition of selected photographs from the project installed at Strawberry Hill House, in Twickenham, London, a presentation that has now migrated to Waddesdon Manor where it is installed until 22 June.

Strawberry Hill House and garden was created by writer and Prime Minister’s son Horace Walpole, from 1749, as a unique, sensorial, neogothic container for himself, his coterie of friends, and a vast collection of eccentric art and objects. The building was later owned by the Waldegrave family and, from 1846, Frances, Countess Waldegrave. The daughter of an internationally famous Jewish opera singer, she revived the house after years of neglect, with it passing after her death to Baron Hermann de Stern, from a Jewish banking dynasty.




“I imagined that Countess Waldegrave had a connection with nature, probably not in a kind of sentimental way, but more intellectual,” Binet says of her images that work to capture more than just the architectural legacy, adding “that's why I started to look at the wallpaper with birds and strawberries.” Binet was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at London’s Royal Academy in 2022, a display of work which evidenced the artist’s interest in exploring the built environment in deeper and more poetic ways than many architectural photographers, but still this project meant she could take a new approach to considering the subjects. “Often, I don’t get information about the owner, only the architect, and that was very nice in this project, to consider the owner,” she explained, considering the house as a place of many layers of stories, not only that of the designer.”

“This project is really about considering the first dream that made the owner decide ‘I'm going to do it this way!’,” Binet explains, “and this is fascinating because somebody once had a dream to make a Greek villa, or a 17th century castle, or a kind of Renaissance house.” She hints at the range of architectures contained in the research, spanning centuries and taking the artist to some wonderful, important homes. “Of course, to visit Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat was very important – I’d never been before, and I decided to look at it differently, to also show the flowers and garden that layer through the architecture.”




In the blurb for the book, Neil MacGregor states that the book “[shows] that these are more than just houses - they are monuments to the long nineteenth-century battle between prejudice and assimilation, played out in magnificent buildings and princely collections.” Binet agrees, suggesting that this is where the variety of architectural styles comes from: “Words hold the Jewish tradition, not buildings, so how to build something when you want to assimilate?”

Binet continues, suggesting that while Christianity and Islam come with a long history of architectural spaces and typologies and that while there are synagogues of important historical interest, “it’s the text that matters more, the words,” adding that the migratory experiences of the Jewish people means that when arriving in a new place the question may be asked: “’How do I belong here?’ – you make a garden and you make a house.”