“a mixture of Elizabethan and Renaissance features”.
Even Lord Overstone, who was noted for his taste in the arts, hated the House and refused to live in it after it was built, preferring to stay with his daughter at Lockinge in Berkshire. Sadly his wife died before the building was completed.
Harriet Sarah Loyd, later to become Lady Wantage, inherited the estate when her father passed away 1883 and used regularly during the winter hunting season until her husband death in 1901.
The house was then leased out successively to a Field Marshall, Lord Grenville, and then to the Australian shipping magnate Malcolm McEacharn and his wife who regularly entertained in lavish style. On the death of Lady Wantage, most of the estate was sold off to its tenant and farmer, however the Mansion plus 70 acres was sold for £9000 to Sir Philip Stott, the architect. He bequethed its use to the Conservative and Unionist Party for use as a college in 1923. He was later to condemnthe scheme as ‘an abject failure’ and eventually sold the property to the Charlotte Masons Schools Company in July 1929 for conversion to a girls’ Public School under the guidance of Henrietta Franklin, who herself daughter of Samuel Montagu, another eminent Victorian Banker. The School occupied the Main House, Carriage block and stables and farm buildings for fifty years until July 1979 when the financial imperatives of maintaining a crumbling Victorian estate became too much. The estate was sold as a single lot by tender to speculators for £701.000, who later sold the House and 70 acres to the New Testament Church of God for £100 000 in 1980.
A fire in 2001 believed to have started in an upstairs dorm, sometimes referred to as the gallery by the students of the girls school, lasting approximately 12 hours destroyed all of the striking features including the parque flooring and the beautiful stair case.