Luton Hoo

Pre-1762

The manor of Luton Hoo is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, but a family called de Hoo occupied a manor house on the site for four centuries, until the death of Thomas Hoo, 1st Baron Hoo and Hastings in 1455. The manor passed from the de Hoo family to the Rotherham family then to the Napier family. Successive houses were built on the site. In 1751 Francis Herne, a Member of Parliament MP for Bedford, inherited the house from his kinswoman Miss Napier.

Crichton-Stuart

In 1762 Francis Herne sold the estate for £94,700 to John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute.^[1] Following an unhappy period as Prime Minister from 1762 to 1763, Bute decided to concentrate his energies on his estate at Luton Hoo.

1829 engraving of Luton Hoo, as designed by Robert Adam. Two major sets of alterations were made after this image was published

The present house was built by the 3rd Earl of Bute to the designs of the neoclassical architect Robert Adam. Work commenced in 1767. The original plan had been for a grand and magnificent new house, but this plan was never fully executed and much of the work was a remodelling of the older house. Building work was interrupted by a fire in 1771 but by 1774 the house, though incomplete, was inhabited. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who visited the house in 1781, remarked: "This is one of the places I do not regret coming to see ... in the house magnificence is not sacrificed to convenience, nor convenience to magnificence".

Luton Hoo was one of the largest houses for which Adam was wholly responsible. While Adam was working on the mansion, the landscape gardener Capability Brown was enlarging and redesigning the park, which was enlarged from about 300 acres (1.2 km²) to 1,200 acres (4.9 km²). Brown dammed the River Lea to form two lakes, one of which is 60 acres (240,000 m²) in size. In the early 20th century, part of the park overlooked by the south-west facade of the house was transformed into formal gardens.

In about 1830 John Crichton-Stuart, 2nd Marquess of Bute, grandson of the 3rd Earl, transformed the house, to the designs of the architect Robert Smirke (later Sir Robert, 1781–1867), a leading architect of the era. Smirke redesigned the house (with the exception of the south front) to resemble its present form today, complete with a massive portico, similar to that designed by Adam but never built. His early work and domestic designs, such as that at Eastnor Castle, were often in a medieval style; he seems to have reserved his Greek revival style for public buildings such as the British Museum. Hence Luton Hoo, neither gothic nor strictly Greek revival, is an unusual example of him using a classical style for domestic use, which perhaps he felt would be sympathetic to Adam's original conception. In 1843 a devastating fire destroyed much of the house and its contents. The house remained a burnt-out shell until after 1848 when the estate was sold to John Shaw Leigh (d.1871)

Leigh

1855 engraving entitled: Luton Hoo, the seat of John Shaw Leigh, Esq^re.

1872 portrait of John Gerard Leigh (1821-1875) of Luton Hoo

John Gerard Leigh (1821-1875), of Luton Hoo, Master of the Hertfordshire Foxhounds

In 1848 the estate with burnt-out house was purchased by John Shaw Leigh (d.1871), a Liverpool solicitor and property speculator, Mayor of Liverpool in 1841, whose family originated in Lipton, in Lancashire.^[2] He married Hannah Blundell-Hollinshead,^[3] a daughter of Henry Blundell (1755-1832), Mayor of Liverpool 1791-4 & 1807, owner of Orrell, Blackrod and Pemberton collieries near Liverpool.^[4] His father, John Leigh, senior, was a solicitor and land agent to the Earl of Derby, the major landowner in the Liverpool area, but also purchased much land in the area for himself on credit. John Leigh was the local agent of the Tory politician Bamber Gascoyne (1758–1824) and was secretary of the "True Blue Club",^[5] a Tory political club formed in 1818, to support his election organisation.^[6] With the coming of the railways to Liverpool in the 1840's the value of his holdings increased dramatically. It was remarked of John Leigh, senior:^[7]

"That he had a keen foresight beyond most of his contemporaries into the coming greatness of Liverpool there can be no doubt, but the actuality far exceeded his most sanguine expectations. The railway demands formed an element altogether outside of his calculations however shrewd...The Leighs carried a flair for the timely and well sited purchases of property to a remarkably high degree. And although no doubt their dealings with the railway companies on behalf of the great landowners they represented gave them both an unusual measure of inside information and a degree of monopoly control as vendors of land, the skill with which they made capital from these assets in the early railway age is unusual".

Leigh rebuilt the derelict shell in the style and manner of Smirke, rather than to Adam's earlier plan. In about 1863 "there was found a hoard of Roman coins near Luton, on the estate of John Shaw Leigh, Esq., of Luton Hoo. The coins, which must have been nearly a thousand in number, had been deposited in an imperfectly burnt urn composed of clay and pounded shell, and consisted of denarii and small brass, ranging from the time of Caracalla to that of Claudius Gothicus".^[8] In 1871 the estate was inherited by his son John Gerard Leigh (1821-1875), who in 1872 married Eleanor Louisa Hawkes (d.1899), a daughter of Thomas Hawkes and widow of Hon. Humble Dudley Ward (1821-1870), a son of William Humble Ward, 10th Baron Ward of Birmingham.^[9] She was a close friend of the Prince of Wales.^[10] John Gerard Leigh died in 1875, only three years after his marriage, childless. He left all his money to his wife Eleanor, together with a life-interest in Luton Hoo,^[11] with remainder to his nephew Henry Leigh.^[12] In 1883 Eleanor remarried to Christian Frederick de Falbe (1828-1896),^[13] the Danish ambassador to the United Kingdom, thus becoming known as "Madame de Falbe". She entertained lavishly and during her tenure Luton Hoo began an association with the British royal family. At Luton Hoo in 1891 Mary of Teck (the future Queen Mary) was proposed to by Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, who died soon after the engagement. Madame de Falbe died in 1899 when the estate reverted to her second husband's nephew, Captain Henry Gerard Leigh (1856-1900), 1st Life Guards, who in 1886 had married Marion Lindsay Antrobus, a daughter of Hugh Lindsay Antrobus.^[14] He died one year after having inherited Luton Hoo,^[15] leaving an 11 year-old son Lt-Col. John Cecil Gerard Leigh (1889-1963), on whose behalf in 1903 Luton Hoo was sold to Sir Julius Wernher, the diamond magnate, who had rented it since 1899.^[16] John Leigh later lived at Thorp Satchville Hall, Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire.^[17]

Wernher

In 1903 the house was bought by Sir Julius Wernher, who had made his fortune from the diamond mines of South Africa. Wernher remodelled the interior to the designs of Charles Mewes and Arthur Davis, the architects of the Ritz Hotel in London. It was at this time that the mansard roof was added, to increase the amount of staff accommodation. This alteration, coupled with the newly installed casement windows was in the Second Empire style of architecture.

The lavish redesigning of the interior in the belle epoque style resulted in a magnificent backdrop for Wernher's famous art collection. The marble-walled dining room was designed to display Beauvais tapestries, while the newly installed curving marble staircase enveloped Bergonzoli's statue "The Love of Angels". At the centre of the house the massive Blue Hall displayed further tapestries, Louis XV furniture, and Sèvres porcelain. Sir Julius Wernher's widow, later Lady Ludlow, added her collection of English porcelain to the treasures of the house.

The Wernhers' great art collection, equal to that of the Rothschilds, their near neighbours at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, was later further enhanced by the marriage of Harold Augustus Wernher, the son of Julius Wernher, to Anastasia de Torby, the morganatic daughter of a member of the former Russian Imperial family, generally known as "Lady Zia". She brought to the collection an incomparable assembly of Renaissance enamels and Russian artefacts, including works by Peter Carl Fabergé, the Russian Imperial court jeweller. Many of the Fabergé items were stolen in the 1990s. For many years the collection and house were open to the public.

During World War II the Wernher family allowed the house to serve as Headquarters Eastern Command.^[18] Luton Hoo's estate was used as a tank testing ground for the Churchill tanks which were produced in factories in the town of Luton.

Phillips

Following Lady Zia's death in 1977, the estate passed to her grandson Nicholas Harold Phillips, after whose untimely death in 1991 the house was sold. The collection is now on permanent display at Ranger's House in Grenwich, near London. In 1997 the grounds were hired-out for the Tribal Gathering dance music festival, and again in 2005 (although the latter event was cancelled due to the 7 July 2005 London bombings).

The dining room in the new hotel – April 2008

Hotel

The House has now been converted into a luxury hotel called the Luton Hoo Hotel, Golf, and Spa, which opened on 1 October 2007. It has 228 bedrooms and suites. Part of the restoration project involved rebuilding the second floor of the house, which was included in the plans drawn up by the original architects. The owners, Elite Hotels, say that furnishings have been selected with the aim of restoring the house to its former glory. However ownership of the surrounding estate is retained by the descendants of Sir Julius and Lady Alice Wernher who operate a modern diversified country estate.