The story
Rising out of the Buckinghamshire countryside is a French Renaissance château, complete with turrets and towers borrowed from Blois and Chambord in the Loire Valley. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild built it between 1874 and 1889, hiring a French architect, Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, to raise a piece of 16th-century France on an English hill.
Ferdinand loved 18th-century French art, and he filled the house with it: Sèvres porcelain, Savonnerie carpets, and panelling and furniture that had once stood in Parisian townhouses before the Revolution. Some of the wall panels came from the homes of a duke and a royal financier. On the walls hang English portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds beside Dutch masters.
The Rothschild family gave Waddesdon to the National Trust in 1957, though the family foundation still runs it. It stays a rare thing, a Victorian collector's house kept close to the way he arranged it, down to the flowers changed in the beds each season.
