The garden at Kingcombe was created on former agricultural land which was unoccupied until the construction of Kingcombe House in the mid-1920s. The house, designed by Leslie Mansfield for Gordon Russell, was completed in 1926, and Russell took up residence in May of that year. (Sir) Gordon Russell (1892-1980) was an eminent designer and craftsman who was born in London. His father purchased the Lygon Arms Hotel in Broadway in 1904, where the family came into contact with the Arts and Crafts movement designers and makers of the Guild of Handicraft, the community of craftspeople brought to Chipping Campden from the East end of London by C R Ashbee in 1902. Gordon served as an officer in the First World War, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1918. On his return home, he set up as a furniture maker and designer in the Arts and Crafts tradition, becoming highly successful and beginning a company which continued into the C21. During the Second World War, Russell was instrumental in developing utility furniture, becoming chairman of the Utility Furniture Design Panel. After the war, he was appointed Director of the Council of Industrial Design (later the Design Council), and first chair of the Crafts Council. He wrote extensively on furniture and design and was awarded a knighthood in 1955 for services to design.
Russell, writing in his autobiography in 1967 (see SOURCES), stated that ‘We had not thought of the house and garden together, which seems very odd to me now.’ He began to work on the area around the house, and used the natural topography to guide the overall layout: ‘As the ground was flat in one direction and sloped in another it was natural to terrace it and gradually some sort of order appeared…’. Dry stone walls, using stone quarried locally at Campden, Broadway and Snowshill, were constructed to retain the terraces. Russell’s taste was influenced by the cottage garden planting of Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, and he was struck by reading about the Italianate taste which was influencing English Arts and Crafts gardens: ‘To link house, garden and landscape into one harmonious whole and to plan the garden as a series of outdoor rooms was a new idea which appealed to me.’ The site, at the top of a slope with an abundant water supply from a number of springs, lent itself to the creation of an Italian-inspired garden at Kingcombe.
Russell’s reading included works on garden design by Geoffrey Jellicoe, whom he had previously met at a party, resulting in an invitation to Kingcombe to discuss the garden. Jellicoe first visited in September 1931, tentatively approving Gordon Russell’s emerging plan for the terraced garden design. Jellicoe designed the feature which would unite and terminate the terraces at the western end, the Italian Steps: a flight of broad and shallow stone steps enclosed by walls and hedging, with water running through a series of stone troughs on either side, from the top to the bottom of the terraces, opening up a walk from the level of the lane to the lawn below. A long lawn was laid, leading to the garden front of the house, running parallel to the road, with an herbaceous border alongside. This was overlooked by a high terrace, for which Russell carved a series of stone benches where long views could be taken in over the garden and out into the countryside towards Chipping Campden. Two parallel yew hedges created a long narrow Italianate garden with a strict axial path. To the west of the Italian steps, a flat-roofed summer house included a carved green man from whose mouth issued the spring water which fed the troughs alongside the steps, and to the west again, Jellicoe urged Gordon Russell to plant a stand of beech trees as a shelter belt at the corner of the plot, to act as a windbreak and mask the junction of Dyer’s Lane and Kingcomb Lane. The eventual plan for the garden which Jellicoe and his partner Russell Page devised as a result of their work at the site with Gordon Russell was put together in 1936; it carefully related the gardens to their site and rooted the design in the landscape. A plan preserved in the archives of the Sir Gordon Russell Museum is neither signed nor dated, but shows the house as it was before the 1937 extensions, and is therefore closely dateable; it includes the terraced gardens already designed by Jellicoe, together with the rose garden and flower garden alongside the house; and a second water garden which was also to his design, running southwards from the end of the ancillary range, beginning with a geometric, zig-zag channel crossed by bridges, and a chain of irregular pools running out into the meadow. At right angles, the water would run into a long, almost straight canal hugging the lower terrace along its length. This plan appears to have been only partly executed, with the design of the zig-zag pools later modified and softened, though the canal was built as planned.
The garden was not completed before the outbreak of war, and during the period 1939-1945, the lawns and flower beds were given over to the growing of vegetables and houses for poultry, though the landscaping was maintained as far as possible. After 1945, the garden was restored and extended by Gordon Russell, probably in three main phases. The eastern end of the formal canal was disguised by a grotto-tunnel into which the water disappeared, with a children’s castle built in stone on top. Below this, creating a final terrace, Russell built, with his own hands, a ten-foot high retaining wall running 110 feet along below the canal, to create a new, grassy terrace at the foot of the existing garden; it was completed in 1950. A series of concrete pools overhung by tufa rocks was created at the eastern end of the garden, in place of Jellicoe’s planned zig-zag ponds. A small, enclosed ‘Japanese’ garden was made in the courtyard between the three wings of the house and the road, with a formal, square pool with water lilies and paved surround. As a designer and craftsman, Gordon Russell made a wealth of carved features around the garden, including stone lintels and benches, all carved to his own designs, and made to suit their spaces. Russell carved his own bespectacled portrait head as a conduit to sit just under the house; his grandchildren were regularly sent to collect a jug of spring water from his mouth for the dinner table. The conduit fed the pools to the north-east of the garden.
Russell became interested in the plastic qualities of concrete in the post-war years, leading to further additions to the gardens, made in cast concrete using stone dust to match the colour of the limestone used for the existing features. The yew walk was softened by the addition of cast concrete planters in a variety of shapes, moulded using different methods of shuttering, including wattle, basketry and railway sleepers, creating a less formal, more meandering route through the space. The most striking addition was an arcade of thirteen parabolic concrete arches on slender piers, set against the terrace of the cherry walk above the canal; Russell was working on this feature in 1967. The retaining wall of the terrace between the piers was embellished by hundreds of glass wine bottles claimed from the Lygon Arms, set end-on into a matrix of concrete. Concrete was also used for the piers of a pergola added in 1971 at the end of the terrace overlooking the canal. Russell’s 1967 development plan for the garden concentrates on the planting, using the mature deciduous trees in the meadow below the terraces to frame views, and simplifying the planting closer to the house.
Sir Gordon Russell and his wife, Toni, lived at Kingcombe for the remainder of their lives. Subsequent owners have made very little in the way of alteration, though the summer house has lost its roof, and the green man carving has been moved to its interior. A new vegetable plot has been set up to the south west of the Italian steps, and a new opening created from Kingcomb Lane into a yard in a clearing in the beeches to the south-west of the upper terraces. A new main entrance and approach to the house was added in the early C21, creating a wider opening to the north-east of the house and bringing a new driveway following the upper contour towards the north-eastern end of the building.