Wyndcliffe Court is a Grade II listed Arts and Crafts house just outside Chepstow in Monmouthshire designed by Eric Francis and built for Charles Clay in 1922. The house stands on high ground facing south, with magnificent views southward over the coastal plain and Bristol Channel. Clay commissioned Henry Avray Tipping to design a garden to the south and west of the house. Francis and Tipping were used to collaborating, for Francis was the architect of two of Tipping's own houses. Their familiarity is evident at Wyndcliffe, where house and garden sit happily together. The garden, with its toppling yew topiary, sun-warmed stone walls, formal terracing, trickling fountain and bowling-green lawn, bears all the hallmarks of Tipping's designs.
It is a much larger garden than Tipping's own at High Glanau, also in Monmouthshire, but it has the same generous proportions and comfortable, domestic feel.  The garden is laid out on the slope to the south side of the house, overlooking the Severn estuary. Its core is formal, with a stone paved side terrace running the full length of the house, and a stone pergola at its eastern end. 
The house stands above a broad south-facing terrace, where capsizing mounds of clipped yew jostle among stone-edged flowerbeds and water drips from an elegant dolphin wall fountain. The interface between the smooth grass of the bowling green below the terrace gives way to shady paths through the woods, creating exactly the contrast between cultivation and natural landscape that Tipping loved.
From the west end of the terrace the view is crowded with wonderfully uneven topiary forms. Beyond them is the sunken garden, a sun trap with sides cut into shallow terraces and an elegant, stone lily pond at its centre. A summerhouse stands on the south-west corner of the sunken garden, it stands in the corner of a high revetment wall with wonderful views to the South, the lower floor was formerly used as a mushroom house. From the summerhouse, you can view the walled vegetable and cutting garden as well as a view through the shelterbelt to the south.
Although the interior of the house is not open to the public, it remains almost unaltered in the intervening years. Its fine presence and stunning views are complemented by the beautiful formal gardens. 

"He always seemed to me a distinguished visitant from another and more cloistered world, bringing a breath of academic air into a workday London office. Yet nobody was more capable of dealing with the hustle and bustle of London; indeed, I retain one little vision of him treating it with fine contempt. If he were walking on the southern side of the Strand and wanted to cross to Southampton Street, he would hold up his hand, with an imperial gesture, bringing the traffic to a sudden and surprised stop while he sailed across with supreme dominion.” Bernard Darwin    

Historian, academic, garden designer, stopper of traffic, Tipping was a profound influence and important figure in the garden design and country house scene of the late 1800s and early 1900s. His designs were a blend of formal garden and wild woodland, balancing delicately between the Arts and Crafts movement's love of clean lines and desire for purity and innocence. 
Henry Avray Tipping was born in in the Château de Ville-d'Avray near Versailles in France to Maria and William Tipping in 1855. The youngest of four, he was just two years old when his parents returned to English shores to set up home in Brasted, Kent. Raised by enlightened and intellectual parents, Henry would inherit more than just their wealth, he inherited too their work ethic, love of history, his father's academic brilliance and a powerful social conscience which led him to serve as a member of parliament. Tipping attended Oxford, where he joined, with great gusto, the Dramatic Society and graduated, along with Oscar Wilde in 1878.  After travels in France and a brief stint as a university lecturer he became part of the team to produce the Dictionary of National Biography. However, his main interest was gardening and garden design, and he began writing articles for The Garden, a magazine which had been founded by William Robinson in 1871. After The Garden became absorbed by Country Life in 1905, Tipping became one of Country Life 's principal contributors. In 1907 he was appointed as the magazine's Architectural Editor, and became recognised as one of the leading authorities on the history, architecture, furnishings and gardens of country houses in Britain.
Tipping was an enthusiastic academic, who upon his integration into the Country Life team under Edward Hudson (who shared his love of fine English houses), was instrumental in making the page and a half house section of the magazine, thrown in almost as an offhand fashion into a significant, well researched and detailed exploration of the homes and gardens of the time. Tipping, as an architectural writer, would visit up to 20 houses and gardens in a week, publishing up to 51 articles in a given year.  Much of his day to day activities are lost in the swathes of history, but a single diary from 1908 shows him to be a restless, whirlwind of a worker, commuting from his Monmouthshire homes to visit the London offices on The Strand or country homes with photographer Charles Latham or A. E. Henson. Tipping  frequently dined with friends and colleagues including Gertrude Jekyll, Harold Peto, Edwin Lutyens, Ralph Edwards and Edward Hudson.
His work as a garden designer in the Arts and Crafts style is well-respected. His garden design works include the walled garden designed for Arthur Lee, its then owner, at Chequers, and several in his adopted county of Monmouthshire. These include Mathern Palace near Chepstow, his home from 1894 to 1912; Mounton House, also near Chepstow, which he commissioned in 1912; High Glanau Manor, near Monmouth, built in 1922 and his home towards the end of his life; and Wyndcliffe Court, St Arvans, near Chepstow. His gardens were characterised by divided compartments with sculpted yew hedging, topiary birds and animals, long grass bowling greens, lush planting and wild areas.
His books included Grinling Gibbons and the Woodwork of his Age (1914), The Story of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (1915), English Gardens (1925), Old English Furniture (1928), English Homes (1929), and The Garden of Today (1933).
Before his death, Tipping instructed his friend and head gardener, to whom he left his entire fortune, to destroy all his papers. He died of cancer on 16 November 1933, at Harefield House in Harefield, Middlesex, at the age of 78.

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