Offered for scrap in 1931, Montacute was rescued by the National Trust as one of its first great houses. Inside you'll find collections that reflect the glory of the Elizabethan house, and some enterprising later additions.
Whet your appetite with these five highlights from the collection:
Face to face
© NTPL
Montacute House is a regional partner of London’s National Portrait Gallery and has over 50 Tudor and Jacobean portraits on permanent loan. Take a stroll through the tumultuous political history of this period, meeting monarchs from Henry VIII to Charles I and some of the decision-makers, heroes and traitors that helped shape Britain.
Montacute’s Long Gallery and five side rooms provide the perfect setting for the portraits. The Gallery stretches the full 172ft (52m) length of the house and is the longest of its type to survive in England.
The water closet
© NTPL
This bath in a cupboard might well break records for the most compact en-suite ever. It was the cunning addition of Lord Curzon, who leased Montacute from 1915 to 1925.
Curzon, a man with an eye for interior design, had the bijou bathroom discreetly installed in his bedroom, concealed within a Jacobean style panelled cupboard. The room now takes his name as Lord Curzon's Room.
And so to bed
© NTPL
This massive oak bed which dominates the Crimson Bedroom is boldly carved from top to toe. Acanthus leaves unfurl themselves up the bed posts and the coat of arms of James I decorates the headboard, and confirms the date of the bed as 1612.
The bed recently brushed up against Hollywood royalty, playing a 'support role' to Johnny Depp in the 2004 film The Libertine. Film goers would not have suspected that one of our staff was hidden underneath the bed during filming, monitoring any effects of Mr Depp being tucked up inside it.
A stitch in time
© NTPL / Richard Pink
Creating samplers was one of the most popular leisure activities for women from the 16th century onwards. If you want to see how this favourite pastime evolved over 400 years, there are few better places to start than in the Clifton Maybank corridor. Here you'll find samplers dating from the early 17th century right up to the 20th, showing the skill and artistry of the women who toiled over them.
They were collected over 32 years by Dr Douglas Goodhart, whose passion for collecting wasn't shared by all his family. As his wife recalled, the children would shout ‘Drive on, Daddy, drive on’ whenever they passed an antique shop in the car.
The Hunter
© NTPL / WH Rendell
Any great house during the late 16th century would have featured tapestries. Montacute's original tapestries are long gone but there are still fine examples to see. One to seek out in particular is the magnificent panel of The Hunter that hangs in the Parlour.
Woven by the Gobelins factory in Paris, the scene it depicts will carry you off to a distant land of exotic fishes and birds, still remarkably fresh for a tapestry made in 1788. A procession of animals including an elephant and camel march around the plaster frieze above.
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