Exploring Snowshill: A House of Collections, A Garden of Rooms

A House of Collections

Some houses feel lived in; others feel curated. Snowshill Manor, perched on a ridge in the Cotswolds, belongs firmly to the second category. When Charles Wade bought it in 1919, he turned it into a cabinet of curiosities. Every room overflows with treasures: toys, masks, musical instruments, model ships, Samurai armour. He called them his “cargos” and displayed them with theatrical flair.

Walking through the house is like stepping into someone’s imagination. There are no labels, no explanations, no attempt to arrange the objects by chronology or country of origin. Wade wanted visitors to enjoy them for their beauty and strangeness, to let them spark curiosity and delight.

Curiously, Wade never lived in the manor itself. He chose the small Priest’s House next door for his home, keeping the main house solely as a stage set for his collections. It was his autobiography in objects, a world of wonder arranged for pleasure rather than practicality.

A Garden by Baillie Scott

Step outside, and the garden is just as distinctive. Its designer was Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, one of the leading figures of the Arts and Crafts movement. Today he is remembered above all for houses like Blackwell in Cumbria — a glorious Arts and Crafts creation overlooking Windermere — but Snowshill gives us something different. Here, Baillie Scott was not designing a house, but a garden.

This makes Snowshill unique. At Blackwell, we see his interpretation of a 16th-century Cumbrian farmhouse, complete with modern Arts and Crafts interiors, but little more than a croquet lawn and tennis court outside. At Snowshill, we see the opposite: a garden designed with the same Arts and Crafts eye for space, proportion, and harmony, wrapped around an older house.

Vernacular Roots, Modern Twist

Baillie Scott believed passionately in the vernacular — the traditional forms of architecture and design rooted in each region. But he never copied them slavishly; he reinterpreted them. At Blackwell, he gave Cumbria’s farmhouse tradition a modern twist. At Snowshill, he did the same for the Cotswold manor garden.

Traditional manor gardens here were modest and functional: walled enclosures for herbs and fruit, orchards, simple terraces of grass and stone. Baillie Scott took that familiar pattern of divisions and transformed it into a series of “rooms” for beauty as much as for use.

Stone walls and clipped hedges carve the garden into compartments. Doorways cut through walls frame views. Steps create rhythm and changes of level. Pools reflect the sky. Each space has its own character, yet all belong together. It is as if he took the principles of house design — rooms, corridors, thresholds — and translated them into a garden of discovery.

House and Garden in Dialogue

What struck me most was the dialogue between house and garden. Inside, Wade’s rooms are crammed with objects, overflowing with eccentric delight. Outside, Baillie Scott’s rooms are spacious, measured, architectural. One is abundance, the other restraint — yet both share a sense of theatre, a love of craftsmanship, and a refusal to be ordinary.

Snowshill becomes, in this way, a collaboration. Wade gave it his imagination; Baillie Scott gave it his structure. Together they created a place that feels at once eccentric and harmonious, vernacular and inventive, rooted in tradition yet alive with surprise.

A Cotswold Arts and Crafts Gem

Snowshill also sits firmly in the wider story of the Cotswolds as a centre of the Arts and Crafts movement. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, designers, architects, and craftspeople came here to revive traditional skills and materials. The mellow stone, the craftsmanship of the walls, the carefully judged proportions of the garden all belong to that ethos.

For me, the fascination is in the link back to Blackwell in Cumbria. One house without a garden, one garden without a house — but both shaped by the same Arts and Crafts philosophy, and both testaments to Baillie Scott’s creativity. It is exactly the kind of connection that reminds me how movements and ideas wove their way across regions, leaving their mark in different forms.

Snowshill is not the grandest manor, nor the largest garden, but it is one of the most memorable. It is a place where the eccentric and the crafted meet: a house of collections, a garden of rooms, a story of tradition reimagined