Woolverstone House

“Woolverstone House” as it is now called, started life as St Peter’s House of Rest or St Peter’s Home. The building was designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens and, most likely his assistant Badcock. St Peter’s Home was commissioned by Charles and Mary Berners and opened on 19^th June, 1902. It was built not as a house but as a convent for the rest and restoration of exhausted nuns. However, as such, it had a very brief life. By 1920, it had become a private house. During the First World War it served as a hospital and convalescent home. It may be that Lutyens was chosen as the architect because he knew and was associated with the Berners family. Lutyens had been in the same art class as Mary Alice Berners; the Windsor and Eton Art Classes, South Kensington in 1885. He also appears as a guest at family weddings.

The house is approached by a tree-lined carriage way, the trees being contemporary with the building. The house is constructed of flat, Roman type red bricks under a red, clay tiled roof.  It is built around courtyard with a single storey front court with the main three-storey house behind. The main entrance is through a high wooden gate into the courtyard. To the east end of the house was a small chapel with a lower roof line, surmounted with a bell which can still be heard across the village. A dining hall was located on the western end of the main building. The arrangement of the courtyard hints at a cloister.

Running though the main house on the ground floor is a vaulted corridor in the style of Roman cross vaults which gives the feeling of an undercroft. All rooms can be accessed from this corridor, each looking out across the garden, which is reputed to have been inspired by Gertrude Jekyll. Accommodation for nuns was provided in series of medium sized rooms on the south front. 

The house was built for Saint Peter’s Community, an Anglican nursing order founded in 1861 at a house in Brompton Square. From 1869 to 1944 the mother house was in Kilburn in north-west London and the Sisters ran convalescent homes in London, Surrey and Sussex. The community’s convent today can be found at Woking. Charles Berners was an associate of the community and a trustee and member of their council.

At the opening on June 19th 1902, the Assistant Superior recorded, “The new “House of Rest” built by Mr Berners at Woolverstone was opened and blessed. The Sub-Warden, Mr Doxat, officiated at the ceremony. “The Assistant Superior and eleven other Sisters had assembled at Woolverstone the previous day and were lodged respectively at Woolverstone Park and the Parsonage. The House of Rest was not finished enough to house anyone, both damp and workmen being completely in possession. A most charming conventional building.” The 1903 annual circular sent to supporters and friends of Saint Peter’s convent, the Letter to Associates, referred to the “very pretty Chapel and charming garden and [it] is evident every comfort possible for tired sisters of various communities”.

It remained a house of retreat after an outbreak of diptheria in 1905 brought a temporary closure. During the First World War, the building was used as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, Woolverstone Park Hospital. They were brought to Woolverstone from Ipswich Station in Mr Berners’ private ambulance. After the war, the house was not returned to the nuns but was leased as a private home first to a Mr and Mrs Binney, who named it the “Old Oak House”. It retained this name while the home of Lieutenant Colonel Saint George Haworth-Usher but from 1929 to 1937 it was leased by the Honourable Mrs Louise Johnson who named it “Woolverstone House”. The Johnson’s took the name with them when they moved from the original “Woolverstone House” on The Homestead, on the Ipswich side of the Main Road adjacent to Home Farm.

In 1937, Geoffrey Berners, Charles Berners’s grandson, sold the Woolverstone Estate to Lord Nuffield who presented it to Oxford University. From 1953 – 1990, “Woolverstone House” was used as a boarding house for students from nearby Woolverstone Hall, when it was known as “Corners”. The Inner London Education Authority closed the school in 1990 and sold the Hall and its 80-acre estate to Ipswich High School in 1992. They dispersed other properties in the village at this time, too. “Corners” was subsequently sold to private owner in 1994 having stood empty for three years. It has been renamed, “Woolverstone House”.

Find out more at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1204044?section=official-list-entry