A Private View: exploring Vane Court, a 15th-century Wealden hall house and the former residence of the King of Thailand

Vane Court is nestled into the greenery of Standen, a small hamlet on the periphery of Biddenden in Kent. The approach is leafy, near surrounded by age-old trees that speak to the largely unchanged landscape. At first glance, its period prowess is apparent: its monochromatic frontage wonderfully evocative and topped with a characterful hipped-tiled roof. It sits rooted in its exceedingly verdant grounds, which stretch to over just under six acres in total.

During the 14th century, the area became involved in the production of broadcloth; as a result, the clothworkers, many of whom were Flemish, settled in the surrounding area. This house, along with many others, was built for such people.

Vane Court is a remarkably intact, Grade II*-listed Wealden hall house – a vernacular, timber-framed typology designed to emanate from a central “hall” left open to the roof above. Locally, the house is widely regarded as the finest medieval house in Biddenden. In 1994, it was noted in The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. The renowned architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote about it in his Buildings of England series, describing it as “the only readily recognisable house in the parish of the Wealden type […] in fact […] a double Wealden.”

Wealden hall houses were built for the well-to-do. Even so, Vane Court is a particularly lavish example, with no corners cut in its impressively complex design. Bookending jetties at the front and rear of the house – an expensive, time-consuming form of construction – would have demonstrated the wealth of its earliest inhabitants to those visiting Vane Court. Perhaps it was this pedigree that drew its rather famous former resident, King Prajadhipok of Siam (now Thailand), to Vane Court following his abdication in 1935.

King Prajadhipok was schooled at Eton before gaining a commission in the Royal Horse Artillery, a section of the British Army. He returned to Thailand at the outbreak of the First World War. In 1935, he was receiving medical treatment in the UK when a Republican coup too place. He abdicated in 1935 and remained in England with his wife, Queen Rambhai Barni, where he spent the remainder of his life. Vane Court was one of several residences owned by the couple; they also had two homes in Surrey and one near Lake Vyrnwy in Powys, Wales, where they lived during the Second World War due to the threat of German bombing in the south-east of England.

When at Vane Court, the former king and his wife embraced village life. A book compiled by the Biddenden Local History Society recounts plentiful local spottings of the royal couple shopping at village provisors and cycling around Biddenden’s bucolic country lanes. Their move to the house was even the subject of an article in Tatler in 1938, where their garden was said to “run another famous garden [possibly a reference to the nearby Sissinghurst Castle] pretty close for beauty”.

It is thought that Vane Court’s grounds were especially important to King Prajadhipok. All of the images taken for the Tatler piece show the King and Queen in their garden – seemingly laying out feed in a birdhouse, or sitting on the edge of what is still known to this day as the King’s Pond. The grounds have been immaculately maintained in the years following King Prajadhipok’s ownership – a testament, in many ways, to the delight he is thought to have found in them. It is said that he was particularly fond of the carpet of sunshine-yellow daffodils that would rear their heads each spring.

King Prajadhipok’s legacy remains palpable inside the house too: the home’s current owners still refer to the upstairs bedroom as the King’s Room. Although not the house’s grandest rooms (the field is, admittedly, particularly crowded), royal custom had it that the King should sleep at his home’s highest elevation. Set beneath a nest of beams, it is one of many spots in Vane Court where intertwined histories exist at once.