Houghton Hall: how an 18th-century British stately home became a magnet for some of the art world’s biggest names

In 1990, the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley inherited his family seat, Houghton Hall, a majestic Palladian house of silvery-coloured stone built in the 1720s by Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Practically next door to the royal Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, it was once described by King Charles as ‘one of the greatest’ homes in England.

Yet since the 18th century, it had been almost entirely emptied of its art collection.

Cholmondeley, a keen connoisseur, considered his options. Filling the house with the sort of Old Master paintings that once lined its velvet-cloaked walls — pictures by Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt — would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, he thought, why not become a patron of the greatest artists of his own era?

It might sound obvious today, but at the turn of the millennium, Cholmondeley was a pioneer. He saw that Britain’s stately homes didn’t have to be static objects of cultural preservation, but instead could become living, working, public contemporary art institutions. It’s an idea that has since been adopted by Blenheim Palace, Waddesdon Manor, Chatsworth, Goodwood, Claydon, Castle Howard, Compton Verney and many more. The change of approach has helped these houses draw larger, often international crowds, pushing them towards contributing more than £1 billion annually to the national economy, while also, crucially, providing a financial lifeline for their custodians.

Cholmondeley explains that his passion was inherited from his grandmother, Sybil Sassoon, who married the future 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley and lived at Houghton until her death in 1989, aged 95. She modernised the house, which had been wonderfully preserved under dust-sheets for more than a century, while the family cut down on expenditure by mostly living in their other property, Cholmondeley Castle in Cheshire. Sybil and her husband George were keen patrons of the bold and new. Lovers of Art Deco and John Singer Sargent’s daring portraits, they started to explore how contemporary art could add to Houghton’s history.

‘I was looking at old maps of what had been in the garden before. You could see that there were buildings and follies long gone, taken away in the 19th century maybe,’ says Cholmondeley of the genesis of his own experiment. ‘I thought it would be interesting to commission a contemporary version that would fit into the landscape.’

A fortuitous visit to an exhibition by the American light artist James Turrell at Vienna’s MAK Museum supplied him with the ideal partner. The fact that Turrell’s work was set to replace an earlier monument in the Grade I-listed parkland helped appease the planning authorities.

In 2000, Cholmondeley unveiled Seldom Seen, a wooden, naked-eye observatory that is part of Turrell’s series of ‘Skyspaces’. It is set among the treetops of a small wood on the west side of Houghton, the ideal surroundings in which to contemplate the work. Before long, more interventions arrived. Richard Long’s huge, geometric arrangement of Cornish slate, Full Moon Circle, was placed on the lawn near a ha-ha. Then Rachel Whiteread’s cast-concrete shed, Houghton Hut, was added to a clearing.

‘My initial intention was to have a number of pieces that would bring more people here,’ Cholmondeley explains (a portion of the house has been open to the public since 1975; he lives with his wife Rose and their three children in a suite of private rooms).

Then, in 2013, he upped the ante, turning the entire estate over to an exhibition sponsored by Christie’s, which reunited Houghton Hall with around 70 paintings formerly in Walpole’s collection.

The works on show represented around a third of the pictures that had originally hung in Houghton, and a much smaller portion of Walpole’s vast collection, once considered second in importance only to the British Royal Collection. Walpole had voraciously acquired the canvases through a network of dealers spread across the continent, but in 1779, when the family’s fortunes had turned, his grandson was obliged to sell Houghton’s pictures en masse to Catherine the Great of Russia for £40,500. The deal was brokered by James Christie, who had founded his auction house just 13 years earlier. Subsequently mourned as a national loss, the paintings became the core of the Hermitage collection in St Petersburg.

‘I came across these folded-up plans of Walpole’s original picture hang, so we could recreate it exactly,’ says Cholmondeley. ‘We even put green velvet back behind the pictures to make it precise. The show, which was organised with the Hermitage and coincided with its 250th anniversary, was our first proper exhibition.’

Houghton Revisited was named Apollo magazine’s exhibition of the year. Tickets sold out completely, and its run was extended for a further three months. ‘It was extraordinary,’ recalls Cholmondeley. ‘But then we thought, “We can’t do that again with Old Masters.”’ Alternatively, he decided to hold museum-worthy exhibitions by contemporary artists.

In 2015, Cholmondeley and Turrell devised a wildly ambitious plan for Lightscape, a solo show in which the centrepiece was a psychedelic installation focused on the house itself. ‘James did an extraordinary full takeover of the main façade, including the wings and cupolas,’ says Cholmondeley. ‘He programmed everything himself over several days. It wasn’t a projection, but actual lights rigged to the windows and stonework, with slowly shifting LED colours.’

It was such a success that summer exhibitions became an annual tradition, giving visitors a reason to keep returning. In 2018, Damien Hirst’s gigantic anatomical statues stood in dialogue with Houghton’s Enlightenment architecture. In 2020, Anish Kapoor’s polished surfaces reflected the Arcadian landscape, home to hundreds of white fallow deer. And in 2024, Antony Gormley populated 300 acres of the verdant East Anglian landscape with 100 casts of his own body, aligned on a single axis.

This summer, 30 of Lynn Chadwick’s angular, bronze humanoid forms are on show, whether rising from grassy knolls or standing indoors amid elaborate plasterwork schemes conceived by William Kent — the most sought-after architect of Walpole’s time. Their austere forms are in stark contrast to the silk jacquard tapestries, the hand-painted chinoiserie wallpapers and the ornate gilt Consort’s Throne used for the State Opening of Parliament, which is housed at Houghton Hall when not needed at the Palace of Westminster.

‘Once you make a reputation for something, you have to sort of stick to it,’ says Cholmondeley. ‘For as long as we’re able to, at least. I always dread not having something lined up in time, or the thought that something will fall through.’

With several ideas on the boil at any one time, artists or their estates are approached many months in advance — but only after they’ve been approved by Cholmondeley and his four advisers, the trustees of Houghton Arts Foundation: gallerist Lorcan O’Neill; Sir Peter Murray, founder of Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Veronica Sekules, director of GroundWork gallery; and Amanda Geitner, director of the East Anglia Art Fund.

‘We get together about once a year to discuss ideas, and are always on the phone in between,’ he says. Do they have any strict selection criteria? ‘It has to work physically with the house and grounds. It also has to be commercial — it can’t be too difficult or unpopular. It’s a fine line. You don’t want to be banal either.’

For some exhibitions, an external curator is bought in. Mario Codognato, director of the Berggruen Arts & Culture foundation in Venice, oversaw the Hirst and Kapoor shows. Chadwick has been curated by the artist’s gallery, Pangolin London. Others, such as Long, prefer to curate their own shows. And Cholmondeley always offers his input.

‘Some people put things very much in juxtaposition, right in front of the house,’ he says. ‘Others put things in their own worlds, farther away in the landscape. It’s all considered in response to the house. Some react to its history, others to its symmetry. It’s interesting how different people react in different ways.’

After shows close, many artists leave a sculpture or two behind, and Cholmondeley adds more works throughout the year, creating a constantly evolving sculpture park. Houghton, he says, is one of the few places where you can see major permanent works by the likes of Turrell, Long and Gormley all in one setting.

Are there any artists that have slipped through his grasp? ‘I thought about doing something with Cy Twombly, because of the way he placed things next to Roman heads,’ he says, adding that Houghton’s collection of antiquities had been of no interest to Catherine the Great. ‘It would have to be an indoor show, though. He once came here with friends and stayed. He was a charming man — very Southern, in his dungarees. He sat and played the piano, some jazz. I was going to try to get him to do something wonderful, but it sadly became one of those things that get away.’

Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall is on show until 4 October 2026

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