While the idea of putting contemporary art into classical and historic architecture may not be entirely new, we are at the moment in something of a high point for such a curatorial approach. Country piles such as Waddesdon Manor and Chatsworth House have for many years used their illustrious architectural and landscape settings to show cutting edge modern art, but now a whole host of other places have joined in the juxtapositional fun.

Recently, White Cube have partnered with the National Trust at neo-Palladian Claydon with a blue-chip placement of their roster while Pitzhanger Manor in West London, designed by John Soane, has long shown interesting and experimental exhibitions. Indeed, recessed.space has visited quite a few, including Pallant House (00123), Castle Howard (00193), Compton Verney (00180), Harewood House (00219), and in Scotland Mount Stuart (00226) and Jupiter Artland (00201).




One of the grandest settings for such an approach is Houghton Hall in Norfolk, though as such places tend to, it has a deep history with its connection to the finest of arts. Commissioned in 1722 by Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, to replace an earlier family home, it is only a short carriage ride across flat Norfolk landscape to reach the Royal Sandringham House. A key moment in neo-Palladianism, several architects worked on its initial design, including Thomas Ripley, Isaac Ware, Colen Campbell, and James Gibbs. With William Kent interiors and a 1000-acre park laid out by Charles Bridgeman, a guest may already be overloaded with cultural richness, but from its first days was an important place for culture.

The House had contained Robert Walpole’s collection of over 400 masterpieces, including works by Poussin, Van Dyck, Rubens, Velázquez, and Rembrandt, as well as others by important British artists of the time, including Hogarth and Gainsborough. The house has passed down the family line, though the grand collection of works has long been lost to institutions and museums across the world – most were sold to cover estate debts in 1779, many to Catherine the Great, now presented in the Hermitage from where 70 briefly returned for a 2013 rehang exhibition.

The current owner, the 7th Marquis of Cholmondeley, however, doesn’t cry over such loss and what once filled the house, and instead has been passionately opening up his home for large-scale contemporary interventions for nearly a decade – including the latest, a vast retrospective of works large and small by the late architecture- and engineering-influenced sculptor Lynn Chadwick.




“It was really a white elephant for the family for generations, until my grandparents came in after the First World War, and then they did a lot,” Lord Cholmondeley tells recessed.space. “They concentrated on the house, but didn't do much outside – they took away the Victorian garden out there, they took away the rose beds, and put it down to grass, which is how I remember it when I used to come here as a child in the 1960s.”

The childhood memories resonate, and not just as ghosts in the architecture but as reminiscences that fuel his ongoing relationship with the place. “When I took on the house, I got quite involved in looking at the old maps,” he continues, “and there was one wonderful map from 1720 showing where the old house and 18th century garden with wilderness areas had been, which had been kept when the new house was built. I'd always thought, why don't we put back that area, and 30 years ago, we replanted the pleach lines and the hedges, and the rough planting inside former wilderness areas which originally had some sort of temples.”

Lord Cholmondeley is not just thinking through the process of replanting and repairing the historic gardens, but how through them he found his passion for the House’s art history and what it has become. “On the map you can't tell what they are, but they're sort of red circles and squares,” he continues, regarding the temples, “there were quite complicated pathways leading to sort of buildings, so when I when I thought of bringing some contemporary art to the house, I realised that these areas are perfect for hiding new follies – follies of our own time.”

When one has a house, garden, and heritage of this scale, there is no reason to start small. It was the year 2000, and in one of the areas of wilderness, Lord Cholmondeley removed an overgrown rusty water tank and, in its place, commissioned James Turrell to create a Skyspace, one of the artist’s ongoing entombed architectural spaces from which the changing sky can be seen through a single geometric opening. Each is unique, though the version at Houghton, titled St. Elmo’s Breath, is different to others – a square timber construction on pilotis around which a single ramp leads up from the ground into its crisp confines.

Yes, it was an artist he had wanted to commission, but Turrell’s architectural language and scale also enabled art to emerge in such a protected setting: “It's how we got permission for the James Turrell Skyspace, we were able to say, ‘Well, look, there had been something there.’ And otherwise, they would never have allowed something like it to be built so close to the house.”




It started a project, and burgeoning relationship with contemporary art, that has led to major artists present sculptural work across the house and grounds. Since Turrell, those who have contributed to the place include Rachel Whiteread, Sean Scully, Claudio Parmiggiani, Richard Wentworth, Anya Gallaccio, Ryan Gander, and many more. Sculpture is not a new medium to the house, indeed not only do carved figures dance across the Palladian roofline, but nearly every room inside has sculpture from various periods. But, opening up that sculpture to a public beyond family guests is a relatively more recent offer.

“The house was open to the public from the 1970s,” Lord Cholmondeley says, but I wanted to bring something else – and it started with a couple of artists that I became rather obsessed with, James Turrell and Richard Serra – and so I became personally involved. I wasn't really thinking of the benefit to public openings, but since then we are on the map as one of the few places you can see major sculptural works, and many permanently – I mean, there are few places you can see a permanent James Turrell, Richard Long, & Anthony Gormley…”

The list of artists that have followed Turrell since 2000 has been impressive. Not only those mentioned earlier, as part of the permanent collection, but also those who contribute to the annual exhibition that, since 2015, has reinforced Houghton Hall as a place central to today’s culture, not only as a place that once held the contemporary of another time. Over recent years, solo presentations taking up the breadth of the estate have taken place including Henry Moore, Damien Hirst, and Anish Kapoor.




In 2024, Antony Gormley revived his Time Horizon sculpture comprising 100 life-size sculptures of his own form, which at first may seem an awful lot of naked Antony Gormleys to see in one work, but in an English Landscape setting was magical. Set across 300 acres, each sculpture was on exactly the same horizontal line, meaning that the topology of a landscape that at first doesn’t seem to greatly undulate is hugely pronounced against a measurement of human form – in places his naked self stands on a stone plinth tower, in others he is buried to his forehead. It was a poetic reminder of the delicate surface of landscaping, how minimal it really is, and reminded of processes of time, decay, the Anthropocene, and indeed death.

But Time Horizon was more than simply placing impressive sculpture in an impressive site. It was considered and impactful. “He's such an intellectual,” Lord Cholmondeley says of Gormley, “when I first talked to him about doing something he didn't want to, he couldn't see how it would be of interest to just have a group of his works, he was looking for something that would make sense – and it was so contextual, site specific.”

Such site-specificity cannot just come from a curator’s eye, or an artist’s sideways reading of space, but from someone rooted and deeply knowledgeable in the very context such works are being made for or positioned within. And so, on occasions Lord Cholmondeley gets involved with the curation and ideas, bringing those childhood memories, studious map readings, and personal artistic thinking.

“I get involved if there’s no curator – often artists want to put works in impractical places, so I have to be involved more,” he explains, “and obviously I am very involved in the choosing, the talking, the getting shows here – we are a tiny team, we don’t have an in house art director or curator.”

The organisers of the current exhibition, Pangolin Gallery, needed no curatorial support. Opening in May and taking over the Houghton Hall and landscape until October, in this setting the works of postwar British sculpture Lynn Chadwick are reflective and resplendent. Having passed in 2003, with a Tate Britain retrospective the same year, Chadwick sits slightly under the radar of most famous 20th century artists, though his works are instantly recognisable albeit perhaps are more commonly encountered in urban contexts – including Berkely Square and Canary Wharf in London, and urban plazas in Hong Kong – so it’s welcome to find these geometric, uncanny, and often weird forms amongst such organised nature.

“His work is such that it can go into any kind of landscape,” Lord Cholmondeley says of the curation led by Pangolin Director Polly Bielecka. “It’s a very formal setting here, and they have respected that formality, the geometry – and there is dialogue between it and the triangle forms that Lynn used.”




Those forms derive from Chadwick’s first career in architectural draughtsmanship, in which he concentrated on temporal structures for trade fairs and expositions. He was commissioned to create two sculptural pieces for the 1951 Festival of Britain launching his creative career, and while his aesthetic flowed around human and animalistic bodily form, it never veered far from engineering and architectural logic.

His creative process began with geometry. It is said that he saw the world in triangles, and so his process of translating his visions into welded form was simply one of triangulating the abstract into the formal. Developing his own process of an iron space frame filled with gypsum and iron filings into a solid form, Chadwick did not conceal his material system but instead celebrated its presence, visibility, and strength. Just as the landscapes of Houghton Hall are unashamedly a man-made interpretation of nature, so to Chadwick’s sculptures do not try to deceive or trick the viewer celebrate their material, structure, and form.

This is true of all the artists Lord Cholmondeley has selected to temporarily or permanently decorate the estate. There is an evident pleasure in exploring how art can both push against the historic landscape and architectural settings, whilst also working with them, and despite emphasising he has no formal art training clearly has a developed eye to marry with his deep history of context.




“I spend quite a lot of time away abroad and when I travel I go and see all the important things of interest in the arts, so it's years of being very lucky to be able to see things and talk to people,” he explains of his learning, “and having one or two sort of mentors who I enjoy talking to about art, and I think that is very nice if you've got people who are willing to impart, going around a museum with someone who really knows about a particular thing is a great experience!”

With such a great back-catalogue of artists who have worked with Houghton, and no shortage of ideas for those that may come, are there any that Lord Cholmondeley wanted but never happened? “I had Richard Serra here. He came to see the Hermitage pictures [in 2013] but I wasn't here, so I wrote to him and said ‘Please come back!’, and he did.” The stark industrial forms of Serra may not seem further from the rolling Bridgeman landscape of Houghton, but it’s clear from how Lord Cholmondeley talks that he loved such a potential juxtaposition. “He started drawing and wanted to do something probably for free, but the cost of just making it, of transporting something of that scale… but I will always regret it, you know, I think of having a great Richard Serra on one of the avenues!”




The humanistic, animalistic, and abstract Chadwicks will remain at Houghton until Autumn, but Lord Cholmondeley is already thinking beyond. “I hope to have more permanent works, and to commission great pieces, like the Parmiggiani marble piece – it was affordable and inspiring to be able to do, exciting to have a project and enjoy it.” Managing such a property is a process of not only thinking of the now, but also the deep past and deep future. He says it is important to “regenerate, to try to add something, if you can” and talks about the Turrell Skyspace as just that, an intervention into the place to last into the future that meaningfully adds something creative of the age to the place’s long history.

“We have four or five projects on the go,” Lord Cholmondeley says of what’s next, “well, they're not lined up but just possible – we often don't know which is going to happen, the funding can be expensive, or artists may not be free this year but not next year, there are so many imponderables, and you're constantly juggling – we had a lovely artist here just last week…” Who that was may be revealed in time, but what is known that it would lead to a site-responsive project that slowly emerges from conversation, between Lord Cholmondeley and the artist as well as with the past and future of Houghton Hall.