The National Trust describe the house though they do not own it as today it is a school:
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'Sir Richard Temple, 3rd Baronet, commissioned a new house in 1676 to reflect his family's increasing fortune and influence. Designed by William Cleare and completed in 1683, it marked the beginning of the wholesale expansion of the landscape surrounding the mansion.
Earl Temple inherited Stowe in 1749. He extensively remodelled the house, developing the magnificent South Front along the lines of plans by Robert Adam, and reworking the North Front with colonnades and arches.
Since Stowe School opened in May 1923, the interior has been overhauled to include classrooms, dormitories and a new chapel.
Stowe House is currently undergoing a lengthy 6 phase restoration programme by the Stowe House Preservation Trust. Phases 1 and 2 have recently been completed including restoration to the magnificent Marble Saloon.'
Today the house is managed by the excellent Stowe House Preservation Trust who describe the house and gardens:
'The beauty of Stowe is captured in the relationship between the House and the Landscape Gardens. When the formal gardens were swept away by ‘Capability’ Brown in the 1740s, the Gardens retained the picturesque ideal of the temple and the monument – hence the family’s motto, Templa Quam Dilecta (How beautiful are thy temples). These were framed by long vistas down which to view them. But with the softened edges of the lakes, the opening of the views and the building of even more elaborate temples, Stowe became celebrated as the most beautiful Landscape Gardens in Europe and its influence was felt as far away as Russia. Tourists were welcomed into the Gardens as early as the 1730s and the first guidebook, written by a local book-seller, came out in 1744. To begin with, it described the Gardens only, but during its revision every few years as the Gardens evolved and were added to, it eventually came to include a description of the House.
Under Viscount Cobham, Stowe was a political hotbed and writers, poets, politicians and compliant relatives were invited. The visitors reflected the ebb and flow of the support Cobham received, depending upon who was in power at the time. Stowe ‘Palace’ was conceived under Earl Temple with the redesigning of the South Front as the principal temple in the Gardens in the 1770s. The family’s aim now was to wine and dine the monarchy of Europe and the estate was the perfect setting for this endeavour. As one set of VIP guests came and went, the word spread that Stowe was the place to be and the Temple-Grenville family as the people to know.
A few Royal visitors to Stowe
1737 Frederick, Prince of Wales and Princess Amelia
1768 Christian VII of Denmark
1804 Prince de Conde
1808 exiled Louis XVIII of France (commemorated in
the renaming of the Bourbon Tower)
1805/1808 George IV (as Prince of Wales)
1810 King Gustav of Sweden
1814 Tsar Alexander I of Russia
1817 Grand Duke Michael of Russia
1818 Grand Duke Nicolas of Russia (later Tsar Nicolas I)
William IV several times before his accession in 1830
1840 Queen Adelaide
1843 King of Hanover
1845 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
The modern visitor is struck by the wealth of information available from the 18th and 19th centuries about Stowe. Together with the ‘official’ Seely guide books, famous contemporary writers such as Celia Finnes and Alexander Pope have their view, diaries from House and Gardens visitors, maps, engravings of views and paintings all show Stowe changing over the decades.
And so the beauty of Stowe is not just the relationship between the House and the Gardens but the individual’s relationship with the landscape.
The Significance of Stowe House:
By Inskip and Jenkins, Historic Architects
Stowe House was the seat of the Temple and Grenville families from the 17th Century until the Great War. The family provided major figures in the political arena of the 18th Century, and the concept of Liberty is symbolised in the iconography of the buildings and the Gardens.
The House, framed by its Colonnades on the North Front, forms a propylaea to the Landscape Gardens beyond. The principles of naturalistic gardening, evolved at Stowe by Bridgeman and Kent under Lord Cobham, and by Capability Brown under Earl Temple, placed Stowe amongst the sites of international horticultural interest.
Stowe was renowned for being open to visitors in the 18th Century, and public access has continued down to the present day.
It is essential to see Stowe as a unity of the House and the Gardens. Stowe House is seen as the greatest monument in the Landscape Garden, which contains over thirty other monumental structures and garden buildings given by the School to The National Trust in 1989. It is one of the most important culturally significant sites in this country, and it is hoped that it will eventually be included in the list of World Heritage Sites. The international importance of Stowe is supported by three factors of great importance:
First, there is no question of the quality of the House, garden monuments or the Landscape Garden. The landscape is included in the first category in the Register of the Historic Parks and Gardens, and the House and the majority of the Garden monuments are Grade I in the Statutory List of Buildings of Architectural or Historic Importance.
Stowe House was constructed in the 1680's and remodelled throughout the 18th Century by some of the best 18th Century architects, including Vanbrugh, Gibbs, Kent and Soane. The same architects, craftsmen and materials were deployed on the garden buildings. Garden monuments, such as the Corinthian Arch (1765), can be seen as anticipating the work on the House; at other times, they employ materials or labour left over from the House.
What is so remarkable about Stowe is that the two parts, the House and the Garden, are so closely interlinked. It is widely acknowledged that the finest approach to the Garden is through the House, with the route through the North Hall and the Marble Saloon providing a fitting introduction to the view of the Garden from the South Loggia, which must be one of the most memorable views in all Europe. What is not universally recognised, is that the restoration of the North Front of the House has resulted in a transformation as significant as that achieved by the National Trust at the Temple of Concord and Victory, and the revealed facade is a fitting prelude to the great work of art that is beyond.
Secondly, Stowe is a site of innovation. The House, as it stands today, remains as it was recast by Earl Temple in the 1770's by his cousin Thomas Pitt, developing an initial proposal by Robert Adam. It is, without doubt, one of the earliest neo-classical palaces, and the great Marble Saloon at the centre anticipates by a decade the complexity of the spatial planning introduced by Soane in his idealistic projects.
In the Gardens, the earliest Chinese House (1738); the Gothic Temple (1741) and the Temple of Concord (1747-63) rank as the first major Gothic Revival and neo-classical structures in Europe. Within the Garden itself, the use of the ha-ha, derived by Lord Cobham from military engineering during his campaigns under Marlborough, is another first, as is the Grecian Valley, the first large-scale, man-made naturalistic landscape created under Capability Brown in the mid-1740's.
Finally, it is important because of the extensive supporting archive. When the estate was dispersed in the 1920's, the family papers were sold to a London bookseller and passed on to Henry Huntington, the American railroad magnate and anglophile collector, and were eventually bequeathed to the Huntington Library in California. The Stowe Papers are almost intact from 1749 until 1923, and are not only a family and political history but also virtually complete building accounts for that period.
This has meant that, when working on the restoration of Stowe House or the Garden monuments, nothing has to be left to conjecture and accurate repair or restoration is possible.'
Due to weddings and filming commitments the house is open by arrangement so please phone or enquire ahead of visiting. There is more information on the offical website below.