GOLF
The House in the Clouds
The House in the Clouds is a water tower at Thorpeness, Suffolk. It was built in 1923 to receive water pumped from Thorpeness Windmill and was designed to improve the looks of the water tower, disguising its tank with the appearance of a weatherboarded building more in keeping with Thorpeness's mock-Tudor and Jacobean style, except seeming to float above the trees.
The original capacity of the water tank was 50,000 imperial gallons (230,000 litres) but, during the Second World War, the House in the Clouds was hit by gunfire from anti-aircraft guns based at Thorpeness. The water tank was repaired using its own steel, which resulted in a reduced capacity of 30,000 imperial gallons (140,000 litres).
In 1977, the water tower was made redundant by a mains water supply to the village, and additional living space was created. In 1979, the main water tank was removed to fully convert the building into a house. The building currently has five bedrooms and three bathrooms; it contains a total of eighty- five steps from top to bottom and is around seventy feet high.
It has been a Grade II Listed Building since 1995.
be looking at that again in the spring. There’s going to be a lot of overseeding in terms of trying to get more fescues back in, particularly to fairways, the greens are bent fescue mixed and are probably going to stay in that vein; we aren’t going to try and change them too much because they’re decent.” “Aeration has been lacking quite seriously in the greens, so again that’s something I started looking at straight away. But again that’s really from pressures of trying to get as many rounds of golf as we can and not upsetting anybody by doing aeration work. But the club is on board with it, and we need to do it, and it got to a stage last year where the greens were on the edge. When I saw them during my interview, to me it was a bit of a wow moment and something I thought we needed to change really quickly. Again, everyone is on board with that and the two new Wiedenmann machines we’ve got will help us there.”
“There will be a lot more of that, which will help create the right environment for the fescues and bents, which we want to encourage more of. That’s going to be a bit more of a long-term project, and it depends on how much we spend on overseeding as well. That’s all to try and get back to what it should have been and would have been before I started. It’s heavily played, so we’ve got to factor that in as well, it’s got to be wear tolerant, but it’s a great golf course, and it deserves to be put back to what it was in that term.”
“I think there is so much here that can evolve and so much that can change. There’s a lot of good here, a real lot of good, and the potential is huge. You’ll always be limited with potential wherever you go, but the potential here is pretty big. Obviously, they got into the Top 100 in 2018, and there’s a ceiling there you can get to anyway because there are venues that you’re never going to get above, but we’ve got so much scope.”
46 PC December/January 2021
“If we get the right backing, and if the team stays together and we keep going the way we’ve gone, then it should be quite stratospheric the difference we can make. It’s exciting to think of that, and I think that can last five years easily. I think it can last quite a lot more than that, if I’m being honest. I think there are five years of huge improvement and probably
another five years of pretty big
improvement at least, so I think I’ll have plenty of time here.”
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