Landscape record 0639800000 - Gardens at Tile House (Charmandean School)

Neo-Elizabethan house of 1882, landscaping includes two lakes to the south of the house, a walled (possibly kitchen) garden to the east and a parterre to the west. There has been some encroachment by the school playing fields (B3).
The gardens, pleasure ground and park for an 1880s country house, including garden terraces, informal pleasure ground lawns with mature trees and shrubberies, a walled kitchen garden, parkland with lakes. The design incorporated a 1690s farmhouse (Old Tile House) and existing woodland and many trees which originated in the medieval royal forest of Whittlewood. The ensemble survives very largely intact, except for the loss of kitchen garden structures and layout, seemingly also structures around the lakes, and the addition of minor school structures and sports pitches around the core since the site became a school in the mid-C20.
Tile House is one of a group of country houses which were established in the county in the later C19 on new sites as a designed ensemble of mansion, service structures and integral ornamental landscape. The most extensive and spectacular of these were Waddesdon Manor and Halton House (both on new sites in existing estates) for the Rothschilds. Others of a less lavish but still notable scale comparable to Tile House include nearby Akeley Wood, and also Swanbourne House School, Grendon Hall, Bletchley Park and Rayners, Penn. It is also one of a group of ornamental parks established around the periphery of the great Stowe estate including Akeley Wood, Lillingstone House, Shalstone Manor House and Boycott Manor. See report for detail (B5).