Waddesdon Manor

A medieval manor house, probably moated, had once stood on the estate, though nothing of it survives. In 1874 Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bought the Waddesdon agricultural estate from John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, with money inherited from his father Anselm; he knew the ground from fox hunting in the locality. What he bought had no house, park or garden. The site of the future manor was a bare hill known as Lodge Hill, stripped of its timber by the impoverished Duke before the sale. Levelling the summit took three years, and the foundation stone was laid on 18 August 1877.

Ferdinand wanted a house in the style of the great Renaissance châteaux of the Loire valley, and chose as his architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, who had overseen the restoration of many châteaux in that region, in particular the Château de Mouchy. Destailleur worked in an eclectic version of the manner his patron admired: the towers were based on those of the Château de Maintenon, and the twin staircase towers on the north front on the staircase tower at Chambord, although the Waddesdon tower windows were glazed, unlike those at Chambord, and are a good deal more ornate.

The structural design was not entirely backward-looking. Hidden from view were the newest devices of the late nineteenth century: a steel frame that took the strain of the walls on the upper floors, allowing those floors to be laid out quite differently from the ones below, along with hot and cold running water in the bathrooms, central heating, and an electric bell system for summoning the numerous servants. The building contractor was Edward Conder & Son. The main house was ready in 1883, and Ferdinand quickly decided it was too small, as his architect had prophesied: the stables to the west went up in 1884, the Bachelors' Wing to the east was extended after 1885, and the Morning Room, in late-Gothic style, was added to the west after 1888. Ferdinand and his stud groom devised the stable plan with Conder, and Destailleur designed the facades in a French seventeenth-century style.

Ferdinand wanted a garden in which to entertain his weekend guests. The gardens and landscape park were laid out by the French landscape architect Elie Lainé, after extensive earth-moving that included levelling the top of the hill. An attempt to transplant full-grown trees by chloroforming their roots, to limit the shock, was unsuccessful, though many very large trees were moved successfully; William Barron had charge of that work in the 1870s, bringing trees in from the surrounding countryside to give the grounds a sense of maturity and to create vistas and focal points to Lainé's instructions. Elaborate flower beds were planted, centred on the south Parterre, and James Pulham built several artificial rock formations, some of them to house the mountain goats and llamas of Ferdinand's zoo. The garden cost £153,000 to make, which measured against average wages then and in 2015 equates to £68.8 million.

The cast-iron aviary, completed in 1889, was inspired by eighteenth-century pavilions at the Palace of Versailles and the Château de Chantilly and by Ferdinand's childhood home at Grüneburg; he stocked it with exotic birds and enjoyed feeding them for his guests. Statues and fountains were bought for the grounds, with a particular taste for eighteenth-century Italian work: the fountains to the north and south of the house carry sculptures of Pluto, Proserpina, tritons and nereids made by Giuliano Mozani around 1720 for the Ducal Palace of Colorno. A large kitchen garden and extensive glass houses grew fruit and flowers, including the orchids Ferdinand loved, and as part of the day's entertainment guests were taken to the ornamental Dairy to taste milk from cows wearing Meissen porcelain name tags.

The first house party was held in May 1880, seven of Ferdinand's close male friends watching a fireworks display. When the main house was ready in 1883 he invited twenty guests to stay, and thereafter, on weekends between May and September, he entertained parties of usually fourteen to twenty people, among them Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. Guests commented on the level of service provided by the twenty-four house staff. In 1890 Queen Victoria unusually asked to pay a visit; she was impressed by the beauty of the house and grounds and by Ferdinand's ability to manage the day's events quietly, and was struck by the newly installed electric lights designed to look like candles in the chandeliers, asking, it is reported, for the room to be darkened so that she could see the effect in full.

Once the château was complete Ferdinand installed the collections it had been built to hold: English eighteenth-century portraits by painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds, French eighteenth-century boiseries, Savonnerie carpets, Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries, furniture, Sèvres ceramics, books, Dutch paintings and Renaissance treasures. Works were acquired for their quality and their provenance, particularly pieces that had belonged to French royalty of the Ancien Régime. Among them are a musical automaton elephant of 1774 by the French clockmaker H Martinet, and three of the ten surviving Sèvres pot-pourri vases in the shape of a ship from the 1760s, one of them carrying a very rare scene of a battle connected to the Seven Years' War. In the 1890s Ferdinand concentrated on the Renaissance collection in his small museum in the New Smoking Room; he bequeathed it to the British Museum, where it is known as the Waddesdon Bequest. The interiors were photographed in 1897 for The Red Book, which he published privately. He died in 1898.

The house passed to Ferdinand's sister Alice de Rothschild, who saw Waddesdon as a memorial to her brother and was committed to preserving it. She nonetheless added significant items to the collection, particularly furniture and carpets with French royal provenance, Meissen porcelain, textiles and armour. She brought to the gardens the care she had taken with her own at Eythrope, walking round and weeding the paths herself; with her head gardener George Frederick Johnson, who worked at Waddesdon from 1905 to 1954, she grew flowers for competition, and she introduced the three-dimensional bedding in the shape of a bird that has since been recreated in the gardens.

Alice died in 1922, and the property and collections passed to her French great-nephew James de Rothschild, who was married to an Englishwoman, Dorothy Pinto. James enriched the manor further with objects from the collections of his late father, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild of Paris. In 1928 James and Dorothy hosted a Liberal Party rally at Waddesdon, where David Lloyd George addressed the crowd. During the Second World War children under the age of five were evacuated from Croydon and lived at Waddesdon Manor, the only time children lived in the house; James and Dorothy also provided asylum at Waddesdon for a group of Jewish boys from Frankfurt. Under James the gardens were less impressive, and the South Parterre was grassed over in the 1930s.

When James de Rothschild died in 1957 he bequeathed Waddesdon Manor, 120 acres of grounds and the contents to the National Trust, to be preserved for posterity. Dorothy moved to nearby Eythrope and the manor was never again used as a residence. It opened to the public in 1959, with around 27,000 visitors in the first year, and the South Parterre was replanted with flowers for that opening. Dorothy chaired the new management committee in close collaboration with the National Trust and took a keen interest in Waddesdon for the remainder of her long life.

At Dorothy's death in 1989 her nephew Jacob Rothschild inherited her position and responsibilities, and in March 1990 he succeeded his father as the fourth Baron Rothschild. At his initiative the manor underwent a major restoration from 1990 to 1997 and the visitor attractions were enhanced. The Waddesdon Wine Cellars, created during that centenary restoration and opened in 1994, are modelled on the private cellars at Château Lafite Rothschild and hold more than 15,000 bottles, some 150 years old and the majority from the Lafite and Château Mouton Rothschild estates, described as the largest private collection of Rothschild wines in the world. As part of the same 1990s work Beth Rothschild led a team reintroducing Ferdinand's colour scheme of trees, shrubs and bedding plants.

In 2003 a burglary involving the Johnson Gang took approximately 100 gold snuff boxes and other items from the collection, prompting the installation of new security measures; one small sweet-box from that theft was identified at auction in 2021 and returned to Waddesdon. The Baron's Room and the Green Boudoir were restored between 2004 and 2006 to reflect Baron Ferdinand's original arrangements. An exhibitions programme has run since 2004, including the Lod Mosaic in 2014, a share in the celebration of Henry Moore's work in 2015 and Eliot Hodgkin in 2019, while the Rothschild Foundation has gone on acquiring, adding Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's Le Faiseur de Châteaux de Cartes in 2007. Contemporary artists have worked at the manor and on the estate since Angus Fairhurst in 2009, among them Edmund de Waal in 2012, Bruce Munro in a residency running from 2013 to 2017, Joana Vasconcelos, whose two sculptures entitled Lafite were installed in front of the manor in 2015, and Kate Malone, whose portrait pots of Ferdinand and Alice remain on display. Stephen Marshall designed the Windmill Hill Archive of 2011 on the wider estate, and Charlotte Skene-Catling the Flint House of 2015, which won RIBA House of the Year.

Waddesdon is owned by the National Trust and operates as an independent organisation within it; unusually for a National Trust property, it is managed by the family of the donor, through the Rothschild Foundation, which Lord Rothschild chaired until his death in February 2024 and which Dame Hannah Rothschild chairs. The house has been listed Grade I since 1967, and the gardens have been Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens since 1987. It is one of the Trust's most visited properties, drawing over 463,000 visitors in 2019.