Styles House, Sunningdale, Berkshire
Styles is the name Archie and Agatha Christie gave to their home in Sunningdale, on the Surrey/Berkshire border. The name comes from Styles Court, the mansion in Agatha's first published novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The couple moved here in the 1920s after moving out from the apartment they had rented at the nearby Scotswood. The house is located on Charters Road in Sunningdale and, like Scotswood, within walking distance of Sunningdale Golf Club and thus convenient for Archie's hobby. It was also located near the train station.
Agatha Christie and Archie thought Sunningdale was an ideal location but found Scotswood was small and had various disadvantages. They went house hunting (one of her hobbies) and found a house near the station: "a sort of millionaire-style Savoy suite transferred to the country and decorated regardless of expense. It had panelled walls and quantities of bathrooms, basins in bedrooms, and every other luxury ... Anyway, it was going cheap as it had been on the market for some time. It had a pleasant garden–long and narrow, comprising first a lawn, then a stream with a great many water plants, then wild garden with azaleas and rhododendrons, and so on to the end, where there was a good solid kitchen garden, and beyond it a tangle of gorse bushes."[1] They bought the house despite it having a reputation for being an "unlucky house". Everyone who lived there always had something unfortunately happening to his career, his business or his marriage. At Archie's suggestion, they named the house Styles House, after the book she had just published and which launched her, by now, successful, writing career.
It was from here that Agatha Christie disappeared in 1926. It appears that she tried to sell the house about a year after the disappearance. Presumably this location had too many unhappy memories for her. She wrote: "But Styles proved what it had been in the past to others. It was an unlucky house. I felt it when I first went into it. I put my fancy down to the fact that the decorations were so flashy and unnatural for the country...."[2]
References[]
- ↑ Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 308, ebook edition.
- ↑ Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 309, ebook edition.