De Vere Horwood Estate
This Grade II listed building mansion is a comparatively modern house, built in 1911, the date being embossed into the gutter hopper-heads.
Today it is a hotel and conference venue, owned and operated by ZIZ Properties Ltd.[1] It was built for Frederick Arthur Denny (who had made his fortune in pork and bacon) and designed in a refined Jacobean style by the architects Blow and Billerey.
Old Horwood was a building of late sixteenth-century construction, consisting of two storeys and an attic, with walls of timber and brick, which a Colonel Daucy occupied for a period and local folklore suggests that his ghost haunts the present house.
When the estate was purchased by Denny it consisted of 482 acres (1.95 km2), two farms, eleven cottages, the village hall, parkland and woods.
The purchase of the estate made the owner the Lay Rector or patron of St Nicholas' church, Little Horwood.
[2] (In the Church of England, the legal right to appoint or recommend a parish priest is called an advowson, and its possessor is known as a patron.)
The house is of old russety bricks, which were imported from the Netherlands and old tiles were used for the gabled roof giving an appearance of a much older building than it was.
The Dennys held a servants' ball each year; when the house was thrown open, and free drink, food and music were provided.
The head gardener was also required to provide exotic fruits at the time, such as peaches, melons, grapes etc.
Percy started work as a “pot-and-crock” boy at Horwood in the spring of 1927, even though the house didn't really need one, but it never occurred to either Frederick Denny or Harry Thrower not to employ him.
He was able to supplement his income by catching wildlife; the estate paid 6d each for moles, magpies and carrion crows, and sometimes he would earn more from this than his wages.
Mrs Denny was so impressed that he was going to work at Windsor that she instructed one of the chauffeurs to drive Percy and his father there.
At first she worked in the house as a housekeeper, but later she ran a shop in Little Horwood, only retiring in 1971 because she refused to adopt decimalisation.
There are stained glass windows in St Nicholas' church dedicated by Maude Denny in 1946 in memory of her husband and son.
A daughter, Evelyn Elvira Denny, married Sir Everard Philip Digby Pauncefort-Duncombe, 3rd Bt.
The estate was auctioned off by the firm of Hampton & Sons of London on Monday 16 November 1936 at the Bell Hotel, Winslow, Buckinghamshire.
Shortly after this BT sold the house (around 1992) to Hayley Hotels, which used it as the headquarters of its conference centre business, which ran at several sites.
