Estate of Play

Once you’re 200 or so miles north of London, everything seems to be bigger and bolder, including the country houses. This is Yorkshire, the Texas of England.

Edwin Lascelles started building Harewood House in 1759, using a fortune made on sugar plantations where he enslaved people.

Some of the houses are in fact palaces, with hundreds of rooms and thousands of acres, such as Castle Howard, the baroque extravaganza on which young aristocrat Charles Howard started construction in 1701, and Harewood House, a Palladian masterpiece begun by landowner Edwin Lascelles in 1759. Just slightly less grand is Sledmere, an immense Georgian house, where merchant Richard Sykes laid the first stone in 1751. Though portions of these properties are open to the public, a number of their descendants still call these unfathomably huge domiciles home.

Edwin Lascelles, the first Baron Harewood.

Harewood's Old Library.

British actor David Harewood met with David Lascelles, whose ancestors enslaved Harewood's.

These aristocratic dynasties have managed to keep the roofs on—and over magnificent collections of art and decoration—in large part thanks to primogeniture, whereby titles and estates pass from father to eldest son; when confronted with “only” a female heir, these establishments traditionally go “sideways,” to the nearest male cousin or nephew. Some of these properties still have legal entailments which mandate this succession.