The House In The Clouds
A B&B that needs a head for heights...
The House In The Clouds. As renovations go, this is (and literally) right up there (N Chadwick/geograph)
Eye catching, isn’t it?
And if there is a certain amount of hyperbole in its name, then so what? It’s just a bit of fun, a smile on a rainy day as you drive past it and wonder if you really did see what you thought you just saw (ie) a house that is perched so high off the ground, it needs a cherry picker just to give the windows a good wipe.
Eccentric.
But fully in keeping with the spirit of Thorpeness which was, up until the end of the 19th century a fairly small and anonymous fishing village. Until, that is, it fell under the imaginative eye of a Scottish barrister by the name of Glencairn Ogilvie who’d made a considerable fortune for himself as a railway engineer.
Ogilvie invested his money in land and estates, the latter of which soon included a large area of Suffolk that included land north of Aldeburgh, Sizewell, Aldringham and Thorpeness. He utilised much of this land for agricultural purposes but had other ideas for Thorpeness which he ‘converted’ into his idea of a fantasy holiday village for himself, friends and family.
This soon included a country club with tennis courts, a swimming pool, a golf course and clubhouse and numerous holiday homes, many of which were built in either classical Tudor or Jacobean styles.
The House In The Clouds alongside the mill that was once tasked with pumping the water to its lofty pinnacle (Des Blenkinsopp/geograph)
In an area where you now can’t even think about fitting a small dormer window to your modest semi, you can only look back at Ogilvie’s audacity and admire the man for it.
Ogilvie didn’t, as you would expect, want anything perceived as unsightly or even vaguely utilitarian making his vision of a rural Utopia look untidy.
So, when it came to the village water tower, he arranged for the water tank at the top of the tower (which had a capacity of 50,000 gallons) to be remodelled so that it resembled his idea of a fairy tale-type cottage with accommodations provided in the five storey tower beneath it.
The village sign at Thorpeness made the very most of the villages most famous assets (Ian Taylor/geograph)
When mains water was introduced to the village in 1977, the water tank, rather than being removed, was converted into a huge games room complete with views all over the surrounding countryside.
The tower was certainly solid in construction. In 1943, a Bofors shell that had been fired from a nearby anti-aircraft battery missed the V1 flying bomb it was intended for and passed right through the water tank en-route to wherever it eventually landed. Amazingly, not only did the water tank survive to tell the tale but, the two residents of the tower beneath it, a couple of sisters by the name of Humphreys didn’t even stir out of the deep sleep they were in at the time.
Two years after mains water had been linked up to Thorpeness, the water tank was finally removed so that the building could be fully converted into a house, the definitive ‘House in the Clouds’ that acts as a both a local landmark and talking point.
It is now a folly, albeit a useful one, that could be considered as luxurious a holiday let as any in the country, boasting five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a drawing room, dining room and, as the pièce de résistance, a magnificent room at the top which affords some equally magnificent views of the surrounding Suffolk countryside.
It has been a Grade II listed building since 1995.
I rather think Ogilvie would have approved.