How owners keep the lights on at England’s stately country piles
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The incident with a wedding guest and dead pheasant was the clincher, explains Ronnie, the house manager at Goodnestone, a 1704-built Queen Anne-style mansion with 15 acres of grounds in Kent; a grand house where Jane Austen once danced ‘La Boulangère’ with her well-heeled relatives and where previous lords of the manor include Robert FitzWalter, a nobleman who led the drafting of the Magna Carta in 1215.
As he serves us chicken on fine bone china at the dining room’s 15-foot oak table, Ronnie is telling us about the day in 2022 that the traditional annual grouse hunt shoot, which had been staged at Goodnestone since the 1860s, overran and clashed with a wedding.
“A shot pheasant almost landed on the guest’s lap,” recalls Ronnie of this nuptial faux pas. Ronnie hails from Peru and arrived at Goodnestone in 2021 following a decade working as a butler at Claridges, The Ritz and The Dorchester.
“The guest was a vegan and quite shocked.”
That day, when the old rural economy crashed into the new, was the day Goodnestone House’s current owners fully committed to the tourist and wedding trade. It also explains the number of emboldened grouse we spot during our overnight stay, during which my partner, son and I have the run of Goodnestone, with its elegantly appointed Jane Austen Drawing Room (named after this regular guest to the estate, whose brother Edward married into the family in 1791); antiques-stacked library; four-poster beds and spooky oil paintings of dead forebears.
Ronnie is on call in an adjacent house, connected through a servants’ stairwell to the mansion, which occupies the site of a manor house dating back to 1057. Not that my other half Tim likes to bother our cheerful house help. “It’s all a bit upstairs, downstairs isn’t it?” he says, of the sensation of lording it like a squire.
Like many grand country houses, Goodnestone has been forced to diversify. Since the death of the last family member who lived here full-time, Margaret, Lady FitzWalter (1923-2015) – who restored Goodnestone and its fine, parterre gardens in the years after the Second World War – this baronial pile has to earn its keep.
Julian Plumptre, second baron FitzWalter, today manages the estate and its grounds as a tourism concern with his son Ed.
Ed Plumptre told me that keeping the property in the family, rather than handing over management to an organisation such as the National Trust, has its pros and cons.
On the one hand, he says “[family owners] get to keep the charm of a family house and renovate the house with the character of the family in mind”, on the other “we don’t have access to the National Trust’s expertise and we cannot compete with its marketing and PR”.
Professor Stephanie Barczewski is the American author of the new book How the Country House Became English (Reaktion Books, £25), which explores the English aristocracy’s fluctuating finances and fate, and how this affected their trophy country homes.
Barczewski says the English nobility suffered a series of devastating knocks to their income streams for over a century, beginning with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century, followed by the First World War, when sons of the aristocracy died in number at the Front, at the same time as liberal MP David Lloyd George levied hefty death taxes to pay for post-war rebuilding. “Suddenly hundreds of country houses became white elephants, burdened with tax and with no one to manage them,” Barczewski explains.
During the Second World War, many grand houses, including Goodnestone, were requisitioned by the War Office and later returned to their owners in a poor state. “The military was quite ruthless,” Barczewski continues, “they tore down grand staircases, for example, to burn the wood for fuel”.
The post-war period was the final death knell for many grand piles. A 1974 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Destruction of the Country House, shocked exhibition-goers with its centrepiece ‘Hall of Lost Houses’, a dramatic installation in which designer Robin Wade recreated a neo-Classical portico crumbling under the impact of a wrecker’s ball, with photographs of razed country houses mounted on pieces of falling masonry and a soundtrack of burning timbers and collapsing buildings.
In a 1970s context of blackouts and the three-day week, many reviled this dramatic set piece as propaganda for a lost feudal age. But the 1970s also saw the National Trust accelerate its attempt to save crumbling country houses, Barczewski says: “This is when the country house tourism business really takes shape.”
It was also when the owners of country houses began to learn how to market these grand dwellings to broader audiences, by allowing guests to stay at the properties and, in a gesture with which we are now familiar, opening up servants’ quarters and kitchens, so visitors could explore the lives lived by those below stairs.
In 1979 The National Trust founded Historic House Hotels “to rescue and restore run-down country houses”.
They currently have three hotels which are managed through this brand: Bodysgallen Hall in Wales, Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire and Middlethorpe Hall in York, though the trust offers self-catering stays in historic houses across their portfolio.
English Heritage offers options to stay as a paying guest at storied piles including Osborne House, the family home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on the Isle of Wight, and Henry VIII’s Pendennis Castle, in Cornwall, as well as cottages dotting the grounds of the stately homes across its estate of 400 historic buildings.
More recently canny aristos have alighted on TV as a road to subsistence.
Highclere Castle is the arch example of this, with the current Countess of Carnarvon, Fiona Carnarvon, “really lobbying for Downton to be filmed there [in the 2000s],” Barczewski says.
The income from 14 years of Downton tourism has since funded a multi-million pound renovation of Highclere’s turrets and interior.
The historic bodice-buster of the moment, Bridgerton, has become a big banker for The Ranger’s House, the Georgian stately pile in south London that’s the central London home of the Bridgerton family in the hit series, just landed for its third series on Netflix.
Despite Tim’s class vertigo, I enjoyed my night experiencing how the other half of the 1800s lived and lolled, particularly the views from fine upholstered chaise longues across Goodnestone’s gardens. My son, classically for a seven-year-old, enjoyed the croquet and giant lawn chess set.
Plumptre tells me that weddings and get-togethers should keep the lights on at Goodnestone for a few years yet. “Weddings and reunion stays are where the money is,” he adds. (Toodle-pip, grouse shoots.)
Barczewski jokes that an historically accurate Downton Abbey would revisit the Crawleys in the 1960s as they hand their pile over to the National Trust, and thus generations of scone-munchers and weekenders seeking blue-blooded B&Bs. “That’s my idea for series seven, anyway,” she laughs.
Goodnestone House sleeps up to 24 people, plus two children, and costs from £4,800 a night, or £5,900 for a two-night stay (goodnestonepark.co.uk).
