GEN. COCKE'S HOUSE

If you must have a committee, make it like the one that built the University of Virginia, with just two members. One of them was Thomas Jefferson. The other, General John Hartwell Cocke, 37 years his junior, returned from commanding the Virginia Militia in the 1812 war against Britain to run his Fluvanna County estates and build himself a new house at Bremo. An ideal Palladian villa in beautiful country, surrounded by marvellous farm buildings, this is the most perfect house in America. I chanced on it 20 years ago, seeing a sign for Bremo Bluff and remembering something Jeffersonian in Architecture of the Old South: Virginia. Hoping only for a glimpse of the outside, I drove up to the entrance front, below, and was amazed and thrilled to be welcomed in by Cocke’s charming descendant and shown everything: there’s Southern hospitality for you.

Gen. Cocke made rough plans, and various architect friends including Jefferson offered ideas. John Neilson, master carpenter and draughtsman who had worked at Monticello, made detailed drawings in 1817, above, with guidance from Jefferson; the house was finished by 1819. The original flat roof and parapet were replaced in 1836 with the existing pitched roof and balustrade; otherwise, nothing has changed. I love the naïve faux marbre paintwork on the skirting in the parlour, and its triple-hung sash windows, right to the floor, so that Cocke could walk straight out onto his columned loggia. Lower service passages are open arcades, pictured below, which double as retaining walls for small flanking gardens, left above.

The estate has a collection of fascinating farm buildings like the old milk house, above, its pedimented façade seemingly buried, and the grand, porticoed barn, top, with its bell given to Cocke by Lafayette, which used to ring the hours to govern the working life of the plantation. Before the house was built, Cocke lived in the smaller Bremo Recess, which he rebuilt in 1834 in Jacobean revival style for his son, below.