New Shute House
[2] It remains in private ownership and the main block has now been converted back into a single residence from the two vertically divided apartments created in 1974.
The builder's 5 times great-grandfather William Pole Esquire (1515–1587), MP, had purchased Old Shute House in 1560 and had acquired a 1,200-year lease of the surrounding estate in 1562.
The English Channel is distant about four miles".The decision to build was certainly a hasty one as a field of growing corn was cut down to lay the foundations.
The identity of the architect as Thomas Parlby, the uncle of Lady Anne Pole and business partner of her father the self made magnate James Templer, was first discovered by Maureen Turner in her 1999 MA dissertation.
He broke his indenture and set off for India where he made a fortune, either from government building contracts or possibly from dealing in silver bullion,[11] before returning to England aged 23.
John Templer (d.1832), and where Lady Anne Pole ended her days nursing her brother, as her mural monument in Shute Church states.
Templer and Parlby were the government contractors who rebuilt Plymouth Dockyard in 1763, and nearly doubled it in size by levelling the hill to the south and replacing all the buildings except the officers' accommodation.
The same partnership also built between 1779 and 1785 in the classical style the Royal Marine Barracks on Durnford Street, Stonehouse, Plymouth, which still survive on three sides of a courtyard now closed by 19th-century additions, described by Copper Plate Magazine as " a fine pile of buildings".
[18] Parlby also in a smaller commission rebuilt the kitchens at Saltram House after the fire of 1778, "a fine lofty room with a coved ceiling".
[23] The house was built using labour from distant Plymouth, as an invoice dated 1798 from a builder of that city named John Bellman reveals.
The interior contains much Adam style decorative plasterwork, apparently the work of a certain Mr Powell referred to in the invoice from the builder Bellman,[26] and ornamental fittings.
[30] A large Palladian style stables block is situated around a semi-circular courtyard, several hundred yards from the house, now converted into several separate residences.
The plasterwork by Bellman on the ceiling of the bay shows the signs of the Zodiac arranged as a semi-circle, with at the centre the Pole coat of arms.
In the Dining Room was hung the famous and immensely valuable life-size portrait of Lady Anne Pole by Romney, and the matching one of her husband.
At the front of the house on the right-hand side is the Breakfast Room, as shown on the plan held in his hand in the portrait of Sir John Pole.
[37] Pole employed John Veitch, Sir Thomas Acland's head gardener at Killerton, as his landscape designer, who contracted in 1790 to complete the works, which included the making of new roads and fences, by 29 September 1794.
[38] Pole planted a large number of young trees, including 1,000 larch and 950 Spruce, as an invoice from the firm Gould Smith dated November 1797 records.
