Aynhoe Park
A Grade I-listed country house near Banbury, once the Cartwright seat and now RH England's first gallery outside America.
A Grade I-listed country house near Banbury, once the Cartwright seat and now RH England's first gallery outside America.
We had watched Aynhoe Park change hands for years before we ever set foot inside. The house dates to around 1615 and was home to the Cartwright family, squires of Aynho, for more than three centuries; the grounds were laid out with a hand from Capability Brown and there is a wing by Sir John Soane. For a long stretch it was a private events and wedding venue, famous under its previous owners for a theatrical collection of taxidermy and surreal art that most of us only ever saw in photographs. That chapter has closed. The estate was sold to the American design brand RH, and since 2023 it has traded as RH England, the company's first gallery outside the United States.
What that means in practice is genuinely unusual, and worth being clear about. Aynhoe Park is now a furniture and interiors gallery with restaurants attached, and it is free to walk in and look around. There is no admission charge and no membership. You can spend an hour drifting through sixty-odd rooms of sofas, art, antiques and objects arranged so the whole place feels more like an eccentric private house than a shop, and nobody minds if you leave without buying a lamp. We tend to treat it as an afternoon out rather than a shopping trip, and it holds up beautifully on that basis.
Part of the pleasure is knowing what you are standing in. The core of the house went up in the early seventeenth century, was damaged during the Civil War and rebuilt, then reshaped over the following two hundred years as the Cartwrights added to it. Sir John Soane, the architect behind the Bank of England and one of the great names of English design, remodelled a wing, and the parkland carries the soft, deliberate contours of a Capability Brown scheme. It is a proper piece of Oxfordshire history, and the current use as a design gallery has been done with a light enough touch that the bones of the building still read clearly as you move through it. We rather like the fact that a house nobody could visit for four centuries is now simply open.
The drive from Well Cottage runs east through Deddington and the lanes towards Banbury, and takes us about twenty-five minutes. Parking on site is free. The gallery keeps shop hours, roughly eleven until six through the week and closing a little earlier on Sundays, so it suits a late-morning or lunchtime visit better than an early start. If you plan to eat, we would book the restaurant ahead through the RH England website; browsing the gallery needs no arrangement at all.
Aynho itself is worth a few minutes before or after. It is a handsome village of honey-coloured stone known locally as the Apricot Village, for the apricot trees espaliered against its cottage walls, with the Cartwright Arms coaching inn on the road through. Between the village, the valley view and a house you can finally step inside, it makes an easy half-day out from the cottage.
“We went expecting a furniture shop and stayed three hours. You forget you are technically in a showroom, then you remember, and it doesn't matter a bit.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.