Longleat House

En un regard

Le château en bref

In the hollow of a wooded valley west of Warminster, Longleat House ranks among the great Elizabethan “prodigy houses”, those spectacular residences designed to impress the court. It occupies the site of a former Augustinian priory dissolved in 1529, which Sir John Thynne acquired in the 1540s. After the first house burned down in 1567, Thynne undertook, with the master mason Robert Smythson, an entirely new building whose façades were completed in 1572. The building is striking for its regularity: a great quadrangle of Bath stone pierced by countless windows, articulated by projecting bays and the superimposition of the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders, and crowned by a carved balustrade, statues and domed banqueting houses. Inside, the great hall retains its hammerbeam roof and its 16th-century fittings, while the state rooms were redecorated in the Italian taste in the 19th century. Still lived in by Thynne's descendants, now Marquesses of Bath, Longleat became in 1949 the first stately home in Britain to open to the public on a commercial basis, and then in 1966 hosted the first drive-through safari park outside Africa. The landscape park, shaped by Capability Brown and later Humphry Repton, is listed at the highest grade.