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There is not much to report here at the moment, as I am only just finding out about this historic site, having moved one of the farm buildings in September 2023.  The Home Farm House at Aldenham was conceived as a model farm but more needs to be found out about the architect William Butterfield.  If you have any information you can share I would love to learn about this fascinating and inspirational landscape.

The lastest on my discoveries about Home Farm:
‘The Home Farm at Aldenham was largely built between 1880 to 1885 as part of Hucks’ plans for the park, gardens and wider estate. Conceived as a ‘model farm’, the only original buildings remaining mostly intact are the decorative farmhouse and attached dairy, now Grade II listed, which were designed by William Butterfield, a revered gothic revival architect. While the house and dairy were the focus of Home Farm, they sit outside the application boundary of this scheme. The associated historic brick outbuildings have been much altered over the last century, but for the purposes of this scheme they are treated as Grade II listed by virtue of their being within the curtilage of the original farmhouse, and the emphasis of the scheme is therefore to improve the overall setting of these historic buildings.’

https://www.homefarmhub.co.uk/about 

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…The main answer to this problem was seen at the time to lie in “high fanning”, a system which worked on the theory that high capital input by both landowners and farmers were essential to achieve the high levels of output necessary to maintain or increase farmers’ profit levels and landowners’ incomes from agricultural rents. By the 1850s model farms had become the outward symbol ofthis progressive, technology-orientated farming. The existence of a model farm on even the most modest landowner’s estate became an essential status symbol and thus. although the underlying principle was sound, it often went wrong in practice as competition amongst landowners inevitably led to instances ofimpractical excess.
https://gloshistory.org.uk/sites/reprints/gh199011.pdf#:~:text=The%20philosophy%20behind%20the%20model%20farm%20was%20that,However%2C%20although%20the%20terminology%20is%20Victorian%2C%20model%20farms

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Aldenham Village Residents Association, Aldenham, Watford