thumb|right|300px|[[Ascott House, Wing, designed by George Devey. The garden front, begun 1874, but later extended. The house was designed to appear as though it had evolved over centuries]]

George Devey (1820, London – 1886, Hastings, Sussex) was an English architect notable for his work on country houses and their estates, especially those belonging to the Rothschild family. The second son of Frederick and Ann Devey, he was born and educated in London.

After leaving school he studied art, under John Sell Cotman and James Duffield Harding with an ambition to become a professional artist, but later trained as an architect.

Career

During his professional career Devey had a London office in Great Marlborough Street, where he specialised in country houses and estate cottages and lodges.

His first important work, in 1850, was on a group of cottages at the entrance gate of Penshurst Place in Kent, where he modified and added to existing buildings, to create a picturesque composition, with the intention of creating an illusion of genuine antiquity. in Hampshire for George Carnegie, 9th Earl of Northesk

Devey had an interest in garden design and played an important role in not only the houses he designed, but also in garden buildings and follies. At Ascott this included the thatched half-timbered summer house, or skating hut overlooking the circular lily pool. He has also been credited with the design of the neo-Grecian temple terminating the avenue of mirror herbaceous borders, but the style is to very different that he normally employed.

Other patrons

The Shropshire Archives hold an archive on the rebuilding of Adderley Hall by Henry Reginald Corbet, who invited Devey "to inspect the old house of Adderley to make it habitable". Devey concluded that little could be done on account of its outlook and recommended it be pulled down and a new hall placed on an elevated position to the northwest. Devey's plans that were not to his clients' satisfaction and following discussions, led by Mrs Corbet, a new design was agreed.

In about 1875, Richard Henry Ainsworth employed Devey to extend and modernise Smithills Hall, his home near Bolton.

Personal life

Devey's father was a London solicitor whose family originated from Worfield, Shropshire and Pattingham, Staffordshire. His mother, Ann, was the daughter of Durs Egg, a London gunmaker born in Switzerland and the artist Augustus Leopold Egg was a second cousin.

Little is known of Devey's personal life. As a young man, he had been in love with Flora Hoskins, the daughter of the vicar of Chiddingstone, near Penshurst. He left her £5,000 in his will "on account of the engagement so cruelly broken off between us". In 1857, she married a clergy man, the Revd. H. W. Streatfield, of the Chiddingstone Castle family. He died in 1866 and Devey proposed to her again (according to W. H. Godfrey in R.I.B.A Journal, 3rd series, XII (1906), p. 505). Owing to "certain divergences he was preferred to as a friend". The divergences were probably religious. Devey later supported the Theistic Church of the Revd. Charles Vosey (father of the architect C. F. A. Voysey).

He never married; on the 1881 census he is recorded living with an elderly aunt, cousin and elder brother at 12 Pelham Crescent, Hastings. He died there in November 1886. While never a household name, in the world of architecture he does have considerable standing. There is no doubt that his style was the forerunner of the arts and crafts school of design.

References and sources

;References

;Sources

  • Country Life Magazine. Vol CLXXIII No. 7. 16 February 1989, pp 80 – 83.
  • Country Life Magazine. Vol CLXXIII No. 8. 23 February 1989, pp 110 – 115.
  • National Trust (1963). The Ascott collection. The National Trust.
  • Longwood House, designed by George Devey