Three Gables and its garden were designed by Charles Edward Mallows (1864-1915) in 1900 for his father-in-law, Henry John Peacock, a wealthy Biddenham farmer. In 1905 Mallows moved into the house with his wife and young family and he died there in 1915. Mallows studied at the Bedford School of Art and after several apprenticeships, including one at the offices of William Wallace and William Flockhart, set up his own practice in London. After travelling and producing measured drawings of English and French cathedrals, which won him the RIBA Pugin travelling scholarship in 1889, he returned to Bedford where he opened an office with George Grocock in 1895. Mallows also designed garden ornaments and pergolas for The Pyghtle Works, the acclaimed joinery firm for whom Lethaby and Bailie Scott designed furniture. In 1898 John Parish White, the son and business partner of the owner of The Pyghtle Works, asked Mallows to design King’s Corner in Biddenham, which was the first of his garden houses. It was through White that Mallows received the commission for Three Gables, and presumably thus met his future wife.
Three Gables was the first house built on Biddenham Turn which was then known as New Road. The first edition Ordnance Survey (OS) map of 1884 shows the road with fields on either side. The area that was later to become the plot for Three Gables is on the north side of the road and has a field boundary running across the western side in a north-west direction. The map shows that the corner formed by the road and field boundary has a few deciduous and coniferous trees, and there is also a deciduous tree in the north-west corner and another mid-way along the southern boundary. Mallow’s original plan for the garden has a straight drive aligned north-south between the road and house but this was adjusted in order to preserve the spinney as well as the field hedge and entrance. The second edition OS map of 1901 shows the house in the middle of a rectangular plot with the retained field boundary and spinney. The third edition OS map of 1926 depicts the curved driveway and two small outbuildings along the western and northern boundaries. These no longer exist. Three Gables was the subject of an article in Country Life (29 Jan 1910) which featured drawings by F. L. Griggs who had been articled to Mallows’ office in 1895-96. The article included a plan of the garden – ‘a rectangular space of about an acre’ – which shows the house near the middle of the plot with the south-facing elevation looking over a ‘bottle neck’ shaped flower garden (adapted from the original rectangular shape to accommodate the field boundary). To the right there is a tennis lawn bounded along the eastern edge by a pergola, and there are two small orchards in the north-east corner. To the the left of the house, a spinney with a meandering path occupies the south-west corner, and the rest of the plot is taken up by three kitchen gardens. A perspective drawn for exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1903 shows a garden shelter and lily pond that was intended to separate the tennis lawn from the orchards but this part of the design was never realised. Three Gables was also chosen by Gertrude Jekyll for inclusion in Gardens for Small Country Houses (1912) as an example of the ‘close connection between house and garden.’ After the success of Three Gables, Mallows received further commissions for houses with integrated gardens, notably at Tirley Garth in Willington, Cheshire West and Chester, which he designed in the early C20. The house is listed at Grade II* and the garden is registered, also at Grade II*. Mallows has one other garden on the Register (formal gardens added to the C18 landscaped park at Canons Park, Harrow) and twelve other listed buildings, mostly houses, all at Grade II. In 1908 he designed a third house in Biddenham – White Cottage, 34 Days Lane – for his brother Ernest Richard Mallows but this is not listed.
The garden at Three Gables has undergone some changes, the most significant being the loss of the northern part of the garden, containing two kitchen gardens and an orchard, when it was sold for development in 1986. A garage was built in the north-west corner of the garden in the 1990s using bricks and roof slates from the various outbuildings taken down when the kitchen garden was sold. The only other notable changes are the creation of the herbaceous border along the eastern edge of the tennis lawn in place of the pergola, and the replanting of the flower garden with roses, which both probably took place in the 1930s.