A La Ronde
A La Ronde is one of Britain's most idiosyncratic and enchanting historic houses, a sixteen-sided cottage ornée perched on a hillside above the Exe Estuary near the village of Exmouth in Devon. Built around 1796, the house was the creation of two cousins, Jane and Mary Parminter, who had spent a decade travelling across Europe and were inspired by the sixth-century Byzantine church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. The result is a building unlike almost anything else in England: a squat, polygonal structure crowned with a pointed roof and bristling with diamond-paned windows, sitting quietly in a landscape of rolling fields and estuary views. It was given to the National Trust in 1991 and has since drawn visitors from across the world who come to marvel at its extraordinary interior and to contemplate the remarkable lives of the women who created it.
The story of A La Ronde is inseparable from the story of Jane and Mary Parminter themselves. The two cousins set off on their Grand Tour in 1784, an unusual undertaking for women travelling with significant independence in the late eighteenth century. They visited France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and North Africa over the course of roughly ten years, collecting shells, feathers, prints, minerals, and mementos wherever they went. When they returned to England, rather than settling into conventional domestic life, they channelled everything they had seen and gathered into the creation of this house. The property passed through the Parminter family and was later inherited by the Reverend Oswald Reichel, who made some alterations including the installation of a Victorian staircase and the enclosing of the gallery. The National Trust has worked carefully to understand and conserve the original vision of the two cousins.
What makes the interior of A La Ronde almost beyond comparison is the elaborate decorative scheme that Jane and Mary Parminter created themselves. Every surface was treated as an opportunity for expression. The central octagonal hall rises the full height of the house, and above it sits a diamond-shaped gallery that is quite literally encrusted with shells, feathers, sand, bones, seaweed, and fragments of mirror arranged into intricate patterns. The shell gallery is so fragile, and the ceilings so delicate, that visitors are no longer permitted to enter it directly; instead, cameras allow you to peer up into this secret world from below. Downstairs, rooms are decorated with paper mosaics, prints cut and arranged with extraordinary patience, and furniture and objects collected on the cousins' travels. The whole effect is of a mind both disciplined and wildly imaginative, a private cabinet of curiosities expanded to fill an entire house.
Walking through A La Ronde in person is a quietly disorienting experience, because the sixteen-sided plan means that no room is quite the shape you expect. Spaces open onto one another at odd angles, corridors curve unexpectedly, and windows appear in surprising places, all of them framing views of the estuary or the garden. The light inside shifts throughout the day, catching the shell surfaces and making them glitter. There is an intimacy to the scale of the rooms, most of which are small and low-ceilinged, that makes the ambition of the decorative programme all the more astonishing. Outside, the garden has been partly restored in a manner sympathetic to the late Georgian period, and there are walks along the grounds that give a sense of the countryside setting that once surrounded the house far more completely than it does today.
The house sits on Summer Lane, just north of the town of Exmouth, and the surrounding landscape combines suburban Devon with open estuary views that on a clear day can extend to the red sandstone cliffs of the Jurassic Coast. Exmouth itself is a short drive or a reasonable walk away, and offers beaches, independent shops, and a seafront. The Exe Estuary is a designated Special Protection Area for birds, and the flat marshes visible from the lane around A La Ronde attract waders and wildfowl in considerable numbers. The town of Exeter, with its Norman cathedral and Roman walls, lies roughly ten miles to the northwest. The area sits at the western edge of the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Visiting A La Ronde is straightforward. The National Trust property is open seasonally, typically from mid-February through October or November, with hours that vary by season, so checking the Trust's website before visiting is advisable. There is a small car park on site. The house is not easily reached by public transport, though a bus service from Exmouth connects to the general area, and the house is about a mile from the town centre, making it walkable for the reasonably fit. The interior of the house involves narrow doorways and uneven historic floors that can present difficulty for visitors with limited mobility, and the shell gallery cannot be physically accessed by any visitors. The National Trust shop and facilities on site are modest but well managed.
One of the more remarkable footnotes to the history of A La Ronde is the religious dimension that Jane Parminter wove into the property. She founded a small almshouse nearby, known as Point in View, which included a chapel and a set of four cottages intended for single Protestant women of limited means. The conditions of the bequest stipulated that the property could not pass to a married woman or to any woman who subsequently married, reflecting Jane's evident conviction in the value of feminine independence and religious seriousness. This provision held for several generations and speaks to a worldview that was, for its time and place, quietly but insistently radical. The house itself, with its female authorship, its refusal of conventional architectural form, and its magnificent handmade interior, can be read as a kind of manifesto in building materials: a declaration that two women returning from the world could make something entirely on their own terms.