This is one of two posts covering our visit to Stowe in Buckinghamshire, with this post looking at the interior of the house while the other post explores the large gardens around it.
The gardens at Stowe are managed by the National Trust which is part of the reason that we visited them because we’ve maintained membership of the organisation for many years now, but the house is privately owned and run as a school, and with schools being understandably cautious about letting strangers wander the place with impunity there are restrictions on when you can visit and just how much of it you can see.
We visited Stowe on the final day of our weekend break in Oxford as it was not too great a distance to travel from our hotel in the city. After a walk around one half of the grounds we approached the house from the south lawn.
Stowe House looks impressive with its dominating six-columned portico in the centre reached up a full-width flight of steps, and with the two long east and west wings either side. The neoclassical building’s construction took a hundred years in four considerably shorter bursts of work between 1677 and 1779, and the original architect had previously worked under Sir Christopher Wren.
A pair of Medici Lions stands at the base of the steps leading up to the portico. Medici Lions are males with a paw resting on a sphere, with copies springing up all around the world. There’s a clear symbolism here of the powerful masculine force suppressing the representation of the world – that’s a nice message for schools to teach – and you can see that this form was brought across to China – where lions would have been nowhere near – with their own stylised versions of these sculptures, such as those at the Forbidden City in Beijing that we visited in 2008. Travel dropping. It’s like name dropping, but better.
Entry to Stowe House was just to the left of the steps. After buying our ticket we first passed into the North Hall. This was one of the oldest areas of Stowe, with the room dating to the 1730s. In it were sculptures of Roman deities: Diana, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Fans of libraries – and who doesn’t like a library? Don’t answer if you’re right wing – will like Stowe as it has three of them. Evidence of their use in the building’s normal role as a private school these days, rather than a museum snapshot of how it would have looked, was nice to see. The Large Library in the photo below takes up a decent chunk of the east wing of Stowe House.
The State Music Room provided some nice imagery for me with the polished surface of the large piano within reflecting the nicely-decorated apse and bust it held.
By far the most impressive room in Stowe House was the Marble Saloon. This was where cowboys would come to challenge one another to games to the death with coloured glass spheres. Wait. I’ve just checked and that’s not strictly accurate.
The Marble Saloon rises seventeen metres to an ornate, domed ceiling in an elliptical form. Beneath that are columns that appear to be marble but are really scagliola. Interestingly, the columns here are simpler in form than elsewhere inside and outside Stowe House, being Doric rather than Corinthian. The simplicity to me helps not to distract from the grand impression of the room as a whole. Niches between the columns hold replicas now but originally housed authentic Roman statues.
We finished our look around what we could of Stowe House by stepping out onto the north portico where we could see an equestrian statue of King George I dated to 1727.
If you’re visiting Stowe Gardens anyway and the house is open for viewing then it’s worth the time to look around. There’s not a huge amount to see, it would be fair to say, but the rooms have a grandeur to them that you shouldn’t deprive your eyeballs from viewing.