Qualla: American Museum and Gardens

American Museum and Gardens: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Park, CC BY-SA 2.0. It is the only museum of American decorative arts outside the United States, and it sits on an English hillside above Bath. Claverton Manor faces east, looking down the steep slope of the Avon valley, and inside its honey-coloured Bath stone rooms a New Orleans bedroom from 1860 stands next to a seventeenth-century Puritan parlour, a Conestoga wagon, and a tavern that would not look out of place in colonial Pennsylvania. Two Americans put it all here in 1961 - Dallas Pratt, a Standard Oil heir and psychiatrist from New York, and his partner John Judkyn - and the surprise has been working on visitors ever since.

Image: Colin Park | CC BY-SA 2.0

American Museum and Gardens: The House on the Hill

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Claverton Manor was built between 1819 and 1820 to a design by Jeffry Wyatville, the architect who would later remodel Windsor Castle. The Vivian family commissioned it: John Vivian, a barrister, had bought the estate in 1816 from owners that included Ralph Allen, the quarry magn...

Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

American Museum and Gardens: Pratt and Judkyn

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Dallas Pratt was an American psychiatrist with a Standard Oil inheritance, a sharp eye, and a long partnership with the antiques dealer John Judkyn. In the late 1950s the two began assembling American decorative arts on a scale no European institution had attempted. They bought C...

Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

American Museum and Gardens: Rooms Across Centuries

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ammi Phillips, Public domain. The collection works by reconstruction. A late seventeenth-century Puritan keeping room with its dark oak furniture sits a few doors from a Shaker workshop with its hung tools. An eighteenth-century tavern stands beside a Pennsylvania German kitchen. The grandest is the New Orlea...

Image: Ammi Phillips | Public domain

American Museum and Gardens: Washington's Garden in Somerset

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DS Pugh, CC BY-SA 2.0. The grounds run to thirty acres on the Avon valley slope. Lanning Roper designed an early mixed border. Then, on 26 June 1962, a replica of part of George Washington's garden at Mount Vernon was opened on the site of a former Italianate planting - and the British public could wal...

Image: DS Pugh | CC BY-SA 2.0