A design of splendid convenience

In the second of two articles, John Goodall revisits this celebrated house and the story of its creation in the mid-18th century by the Earl of Leicester and his widow 

- John Goodall

Holkham Hall, Norfolk, part II

The seat of the Earl of Leicester

IN 1773, the architect Matthew Brettingham published a large and luxuriously illustrated volume entitled The Plans, Elevations and Sections of Holkham. The book, as we will discover, was, in fact, an expanded edition of a work originally published by his namesake father 12 years earlier. Brettingham's publication of 1773, however, celebrated the recent completion of the building and was dedicated to Margaret, Dowager Countess of Leicester who had, as the preface explains-animated with the zeal of its founder', the late Earl  of Leicester-brought the house to the degree of splendour in which it now appears, the delight of the present age'.

As we discovered last week, the design of the house was a collaborative undertaking and the preface to the 1773 volume states that its designs were first 'struck out' by the Earl of Leicester and Lord Burlington 'assisted by Mr William Kent' and 'guided by those great luminaries of architecture, Palladio and [Inigo] Jones'. Work to Holkham had begun in 1734 with the construction of the Family Wing, one of the four corner pavilions of the building. This interior, Brettingham informs us, was decorated to Kent's designs 'without undergoing any material change'. Thereafter, however, the plans continued to be revised, so much so that, over the next three decades during which the building was realised, 'very few traces of the original thoughts remained untouched'.