Knole

Knole, one of the great houses of Britain, has been the home of the Sackville family for more than four hundred years. Robert Sackville-West, the thirteenth generation to live there, serves as a guide through its rooms, grounds and hidden corners. Known as a calendar house, it is famed for its 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases and seven courtyards.

Photographs by the designer Ashley Hicks, who had recently photographed the interiors of Buckingham Palace, take readers from the state rooms, which hold what is probably the finest collection of royal Stuart furniture in the world, to the private apartments, the gardens, and the cellars and attics behind the scenes.

The book also traces English history through the people who shaped the house: a sober Elizabethan statesman, an idle courtier at the shabby court of James I, a swashbuckling cavalier, a Restoration libertine, and the third Duke of the ancien régime. Each reflects the values of his era. Vita Sackville-West, who was cut off from Knole by inheritance rules, once described her family as wasteful, lovestruck, feeble, lazy and gloomy. Her loss inspired her close friend Virginia Woolf to write Orlando, which added to the house's renown and glamour.

The architecture and decoration tell a similar story of changing taste, from Thomas Sackville's seventeenth-century remodeling of a dilapidated medieval mansion to a suite of early twentieth-century rooms decorated in the Bloomsbury style.