Brockfield Hall in North Yorkshire is the family home of Charlie Wood and Hatta Byng, editor of House & Garden, who have transformed it since they came here in 2020, winning multiple awards in the process. John Martin Robinson reports on the restoration project that revived this compact Regency house as a modern family home. Photographs by Paul Highnam for Country Life.
Brockfield Hall was the creation of a certain Benjamin Preston Agar, who succinctly recorded its construction in his personal account book: ‘Commenced the building of my mansion house [at] Brockfield in 1804 and on August 12th 1807 came to live in it.’ A well-lettered date stone inscribed ‘BA 1804’ survives in the house, but the completion of works took rather longer than this note implies. Agar’s surviving account book with its disbursements and accompanying vouchers and bills have been discussed in detail by Margaret Boustead in the North Yorkshire Record Office Publications no.
55 (1994). As Giles Worsley explained in a slightly earlier account of the history of Brockfield ( Country Life , March 9, 1989 ), these show that the new house cost a total of £8,239 6s 3d — good value, thanks to Agar’s careful management of the job — but also that work to the decoration of the interior continued into the early 1820s. Surviving with the bills are the original plans for the house by York architect Peter Atkinson Jnr (1780–1843).
His father, another Peter, with whom he worked in partnership until 180.