Qualla: Mamhead House

Mamhead House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Cobb, CC0. Anthony Salvin was twenty-six in 1827. He had no major buildings to his name, and the Italianate plans his client had originally commissioned from Charles Fowler had already failed and been abandoned at the footings stage. What he had was a chance. The client, Robert William Newman, was an Exeter merchant who had built his fortune in the Portugal and Newfoundland trade and wanted a country house worthy of his new station. Salvin gave him something Devon had not seen before: a Tudor Revival country house in honey-coloured Bath stone, ornamented with the Newman family motto and the joined initials of Robert and his wife along the decorative skyline above the front door. By the time Mamhead House was finished in 1833, Salvin's reputation was made. He would go on to design Harlaxton Manor and restore the Tower of London and to handle dozens of other commissions across England. None of that would have happened if Newman had not gambled, in 1827, on the unproven young man whose Tudor drawings persuaded him.

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Image: Simon Cobb | CC0

Mamhead House: Domesday to Newfoundland

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. The Mamhead estate is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as belonging to Ralph de Pomeroy. It passed through the Carew family and then to the Balls, of whom Thomas Ball (1671 to 1749) was a merchant with an unusual passion: he planted exotic trees on the estate, importing rari...

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

Mamhead House: Salvin's First Castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Newman first commissioned Charles Fowler, who proposed an Italianate design. Fowler had got no further than constructing the footings when Newman decided the look was wrong and replaced him with Salvin. The young architect's response was bold. He turned to the recently emerging T...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mamhead House: Statues, Stables, and the Obelisk

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. Salvin designed more than the house. He laid out three lodges at the park entrances, Dawlish Lodge, Forest Gate, and Basket Lodge, each now Grade II listed. Pevsner described two of them as very pretty examples of Salvin trimmings added to plain eighteenth-century boxes. Historic...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mamhead House: Wedding Venue, Then For Sale

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit nick macneill, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Newman family held Mamhead until the 1950s, when Sir Ralph Newman, Robert's great-grandson, sold it to an evangelical society. It became Dawlish College, a school, in the 1960s. In the 1990s it served as the regional headquarters of the Forestry Commission. In the early twent...

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Image: nick macneill | CC BY-SA 2.0