Harewood House

The Harewood estate reached its present size by the merging of two adjacent properties: the Harewood Castle estate, based on Harewood Castle, and the Gawthorpe estate, based on the manor house of Gawthorpe Hall. The two were combined when the Wentworths of Gawthorpe, who had inherited their estate from the Gascoignes, bought the neighbouring Harewood estate from the Ryther family. The combined estate was sold in 1696 to the London merchant Sir John Cutler, and after his death it passed to the Boulter family.

The Boulters sold Harewood on to the Lascelles; the sale is dated to 1721, and Henry Lascelles's purchase of the estate to 1738. In the late seventeenth century members of the Lascelles family purchased plantations in the West Indies, and the income they generated allowed Henry Lascelles to buy Harewood.

Henry's son Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, a wealthy plantation and slave owner, built the house between 1759 and 1771 to replace Gawthorpe Hall, the original manor house on the estate. He employed John Carr, an architect practising in the north of England who had already been engaged by a number of prominent Yorkshire families to design their country houses. The foundations were laid in 1759 and the house was largely complete by 1765.

Robert Adam submitted designs for the interiors, which were approved in 1765, and he also made a number of minor alterations to Carr's designs for the exterior, including the internal courtyards. The setting was laid out by Lancelot "Capability" Brown, whose landscape spans 1,000 acres at Harewood. Edwin's house was finished in 1771.

The house remained largely untouched until the 1840s, when Sir Charles Barry was employed by Henry Lascelles, 3rd Earl of Harewood, the father of thirteen children, to increase the accommodation. Barry added second storeys to each of the flanking wings to provide extra bedrooms, removed the south portico, and created formal parterres and terraces.

In 1922 Henry Lascelles, Viscount Lascelles, married Princess Mary, the only daughter of George V. The couple lived at first at nearby Goldsborough Hall and moved permanently into Harewood House on the death of Henry's father in 1929. During the Second World War the house served as a resident convalescent hospital, and by the late 1940s the Princess Royal and her family had moved permanently back to Harewood, where house and gardens were regularly opened to the public. The estate also hosted concerts connected with the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra and the Leeds Musical Festival, of which the Princess was patron. On 28 March 1965 she suffered a fatal heart attack while walking in the grounds.

Her elder son, Lord Harewood, the 7th Earl, had succeeded his father in 1947 and lived at Harewood. He was director of the Royal Opera House and later of the English National Opera, and closer to home he sat on the executive committee of the Leeds Music Festival and was a patron of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra's concerts. Since 1947 the estate's dower house, which lies outside the estate boundaries, has been leased out for use as an independent school.

Harewood is the family seat of the Lascelles and the home of David Lascelles, the 8th Earl; the house and grounds have been transferred into a trust ownership structure managed by the Harewood House Trust and are open to the public for most of the year. The house was listed at Grade I on 30 March 1960, the park and garden were listed at Grade I on 1 December 1984, and a number of features in the grounds and courtyard carry Grade I, II* and II listings. Harewood is a member of the Treasure Houses of England, a marketing consortium for ten of the foremost historic homes in the country, and it won Large Visitor Attraction of the Year at the 2009 national Excellence in England awards.

The collections take in paintings by masters of the Italian Renaissance, family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Hoppner and Sir Thomas Lawrence, and modern art collected by the 7th Earl and Countess, with changing temporary exhibitions held each season in the Terrace Gallery. Beyond the house are more than 100 acres of gardens, a Himalayan garden with its stupa, an adventure playground and the historic All Saints' Church with its alabaster tombs, and from May 2007 to October 2008 the grounds held the Yorkshire Planetarium.

The bird garden closed in February 2023. Its collection had included Humboldt penguins, Chilean flamingos, Duyvenbode's lories and macaws, with more than five species listed by the IUCN as vulnerable or endangered, and it had been a member of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums. In January 2023 the trustees announced the decision to close it, saying that the last inspection had "identified many problems with the site's physical infrastructure" that would require £4 million to put right and that they "had to make the incredibly difficult decision to close this part of the Harewood experience". New homes were to be found for all the birds, the Farm Experience was to stay open, and the ground the bird garden occupied was to be redeveloped as a woodland garden reinstating some historic walks.

In a 2005 documentary David Lascelles spoke about his ancestors' links with the slave trade, and in 2007, for the BBC programme Look North, the actor David Harewood visited the house and interviewed Lascelles; Harewood's own ancestors in Barbados had been enslaved by the Earls of Harewood. In March 2023 it was announced that a portrait of Harewood had been commissioned and would hang in Harewood House.