James Paine - The Architect of Stockeld Park

Essentially a Palladian, early in his career he was clerk of works at Nostell Priory, and worked on many other projects in the area including Heath House in the village of Heath in between Nostell Priory and Wakefield.

From the 1750s, he had his own practice, and designed many villas, usually consisting of a central building, often with a fine staircase, and two symmetrical wings.

The most important house which he was involved with was Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire where he succeeded Matthew Brettingham from 1759-1760 and suggested the colonnaded hall, but he was himself displaced by Robert Adam, who altered his designs.

At around the same time he designed the very grand stables at Chatsworth House in the same county. In the 1760s he was commissioned to rebuild Worksop Manor. From 1770-1776 he built New Wardour Castle in Wiltshire (which featured as the Royal Ballet School in the film Billy Elliott).

Paine held various posts, some sinecures, in the Office of Works culminating in appointment as one of the two Architects of the Works in 1780 but lost the post in a reorganisation in 1782.

His practice declined in his later years as he refused to participate in the neoclassical fashions established by the Adam brothers. He published much of his own work in his two volumes of Plans, elevations and sections of Noblemen and Gentlemen's Houses (1767 and 1783).

Stockeld Park | Palladian Villa | James Paine | Wetherby | Yorkshire