Stelrad Column Radiators Help Bring Country House Back To Life
There’s a Grade II* listed country house in Kent that having fallen on tough times has been acquired by new owners who have set about transforming it back to its Victorian opulence. Back to being a genuine, family home at a time when most similar buildings make their way as hotels, conference centres and the like. And in some small way, Stelrad’s radiators are helping bring the house back to life by sharing heat around this huge 29,750 square feet property.
Oxen Hoath in the Kent countryside is a remarkable success story, a renovation project that has so far taken just over two years of hard work but which provides a stunning home with many original features including a beautiful carved wooden library, an impressive dining room and a converted billiard room that is now the heart of the home, as a large but comfy and airy kitchen.
And the 28 bedroomed, 21 bathroom chateau style property features 74 acres of grounds, a beautiful fishing lake, a rare but original parterre garden designed by William Andrews Nesfield, who designed Kew Gardens, and a two and a half acre Georgian walled garden. And now around 150 of Stelrad’s hugely popular column radiators have been installed to bring warmth to each and every corner of the house. The radiators – modern engineering but traditional in look and quality – add a style and grace to the building, adding to its authenticity while providing the comfort heating that a large house with massively high ceilings needs to be a family home in this day and age.
The history of the house is quite wonderful. The estate was first established as a royal deer and oxen park during the reign of King Edward III. The first house on the property was built in 1372. The Culpepper family held the estate for generations and it became the ancestral home of several High Sheriffs of Kent and Knights of the Realm. After Sir Richard Culpepper died without a male heir in 1484, the property passed through his daughters’ families including the Cotton and Chowne families.
In 1626 the manor was sold to Nicholas Miller whose family enlarged the house around 1650 and he received a Baronetcy in 1660. In the mid eighteenth century the property passed to the Bartholomew family and later to the Geary family. Sir William Geary commissioned the architect John Meadows to remodel the mansion in a Georgian style. In 1846, Sir William Geary hired the prominent architect Anthony Salvin to restyle the house into a French-influenced ‘chateauesque’ manor adding a distinctive tower and cupola. In 1847, Nesfield designed the formal parterre gardens, which survive today as a rare, largely unaltered example of Victorian garden design in England. The billiard room wing was added to the estate in 1878.
Since the early 2000s, the estate was operated as an exclusive venue for retreats and fell into a state of disrepair that saw the current owners needing to bravely take on a full scale renovation project from the top down, starting with replacing the roof. The new roof required just over an acre of roof tiles, which gives an idea of the size of the task.
The heating system simply didn’t function and this became a major project to provide anything like the level of warmth needed to make the house a family home. This involved the installation of insulation, the removal of extremely heavy Victorian cast iron radiators from ‘pits’ dug under the windows in downstairs rooms and replacement with modern lightweight steel equivalents, cleverly retained under iron pierced panels to provide additional heat in living rooms where the wall space was limited for exposed radiators.
Why did the new owner plump for Stelrad radiators?: “When you’re looking at buying upwards of 150 radiators for a property, you do your research! We wanted quality products that would do what they said they would do and we quickly found some radiators that were four times the price of the Stelrad options and claimed to deliver around half of the heat output….not a great option. Looking into it carefully, it became evident pretty quickly that the Stelrad column radiators looked the part, were well priced and delivered the heat levels we needed – so in the end the choice was quite easy.”
And they certainly look the biz installed around the house, looking like part of the décor, rather than simply functional heating appliances. The radiators have been installed by local heating installer Stewart Osborne and supplied by Plumbase.
The installer says the Stelrad Column radiators have been a joy to install in such a wonderful setting: “We have installed Stelrad radiators for many years and always found them to be of good quality and easy to install. These were no different although having a building like this to work in has perhaps made them that little bit more special. We’ve had to overcome the usual issues that you get with an older building – thicker walls are always a challenge – but as we come towards the end of the project, we can look back on this as one of the most enjoyable projects we’ve been involved in, in recent years.”
Full details of the Column radiators available can be found at www.stelradprofessional.com along with the full range of Stelrad radiators. Alternatively, you can also see regular updates from Stelrad on X @Stelrad and Facebook @StelradRadiators.