Ashcombe House, also known as Ashcombe Park, is a Georgian manor house, set in of land on Cranborne Chase in the parish of Berwick St John, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. The house is roughly equidistant between the villages of Berwick St John and Tollard Royal. It is listed on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest as a Grade II structure. Early history There have been several buildings on the site. The first house was built in 1686 by a local squire, Robert Barber. Some fifty years later, in 1740, the Barber family entirely demolished the 1686 house and rebuilt on the site. In 1750 Anne Wyndham inherited the house. The next year she married the Hon. James Everard Arundell, third son of the 6th Baron Arundell of Wardour. In 1754 the architect Francis Cartwright largely remodelled the interior of the house for the Arundells. In 1815 the Ashcombe Estate was purchased from Lady Arundell by Thomas Grove the younger of Ferne House for £8,700. Thomas Grove's grandson Sir Walter demolished most of the 1740 house in around 1870. Sir Walter later sold Ashcombe House to the 13th Duke of Hamilton, who in turn sold Ashcombe to Mr R. W. Borley of Shaftesbury after World War I. The current Ashcombe House was originally part of the much larger mid-eighteenth century structure, and is an L-shaped three-bay survival of the eastern wing. There is a five-bay orangery close to the house. The Beaton years The photographer and designer Cecil Beaton first visited the house in 1930, taken there by the sculptor Stephen Tomlin together with the writer Edith Olivier. He was later to write of his first impression of the house, as he approached it through the arch of the gatehouse: None of us uttered a word as we came under the vaulted ceiling and stood before a small, compact house of lilac-coloured brick. We inhaled sensuously the strange, haunting – and rather haunted – atmosphere of the place ... I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. That same year Mr Borley leased Ashcombe House to Beaton for £50 a year, a very small rent, on the condition that Beaton would make improvements to the house, which was all but derelict. Beaton employed the Austrian architect Michael Rosenauer