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Mentmore in the 1990s

Mentmore Towers is a large Neo-Renaissance English country house in the village of Mentmore in Buckinghamshire. It takes its name from the village in which it stands, and from its numerous towers and pinnacles. Historically it was always known as just Mentmore, and by locals and estate staff as the Mansion, as is the case at nearby Tring Park. However, the name Mentmore Towers has stuck and is the accepted one today. One of the house's former owners, Lord Rosebery, once said: "Mentmore Towers sounded like a second-rate boarding house". It is a Grade 1 listed building.

Mentmore photographed circa 1914.

The house was built between 1852 and 1854 for Baron Mayer de Rothschild, who needed a house close to London and close to other Rothschild homes at Tring in Hertfordshire, Ascott, Aston Clinton and later Waddesdon Manor and Halton House. Since 1846 he had slowly been buying land in the area. However, it was not until 1850 that he bought the manor and advowson of Mentmore for £12,400 from the trustees of the Harcourt family.

The plans for the new mansion, which was begun in 1852, imitated Wollaton Hall in Nottingham; they were drawn by the architect Joseph Paxton, famous for the Crystal Palace (see plans and interiors of Mentmore).

The old manor house, with its later Georgian facade, which had been built by the Wigg family in the 16th century, became known as the 'Garden House', the home of the Rothschild's head gardener; later it became the Estate Office. Today (2004) it is once again the village Manor House.

The dining room. The boiseries were from the Hôtel de Villars, Paris, and are the first example of this type of decoration to be used in an English house. The fragments of the boiseries not used at Mentmore were later installed at Waddesdon Manor

The Baron and his wife did not live long after the Towers' completion. After the Baroness's death it was inherited by her daughter Hannah, later Countess of Rosebery. Following her demise in 1890 aged 39 from Bright's Disease, it became the home of her widower Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, later Prime Minister for two years from 1894. In the late 1920s the fifth earl gave the estate to his son Harry, Lord Dalmeny, who in 1929 on the death of his father became the sixth Earl.

Both earls bred numerous winners of classic horse races at the two stud farms on the estate, including five Epsom Derby winners. These were Ladas, Sir Visto, and Cicero from the Crafton Stud; plus Ocean Swell and Blue Peter from the Mentmore Stud. Both stud farms were within a kilometre of the mansion and together with the stable yard designed by the architect George Devey, who also designed many cottages in the estate's villages of Mentmore, Crafton and Ledburn.

During the Second World War, the Gold State Coach was transferred to Mentmore to protect it from German bombing.

The staircase, and the plate-glass door leading to the grand hall.

Following the death of the sixth earl in 1973, the Labour government of James Callaghan refused to accept the contents in lieu of inheritance taxes, which would have turned the house into one of England's finest museums of European furniture, objets d'art and Victorian era architecture. The government was offered the house and contents for £2,000,000 but declined, and after three years of fruitless discussion, the executors of the estate sold the contents by public auction for over £6,000,000. Among the paintings sold were works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Boucher, Drouais, Moroni and other well known artists, and cabinet makers, including Jean Henri Riesener and Chippendale. Also represented were the finest German and Russian silver- and goldsmiths, and makers of Limoges enamel. This Rothschild/Mentmore collection is said to have been one of the finest ever to be assembled in private hands, other than the collections of the Russian and British royal families .

The empty house, unaltered since the day it was built, was sold in 1977 for £220,000 to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Later, during the 1980s and 1990s, the movement made Mentmore the British national headquarters of its political arm, the Natural Law Party.

Mentmore 1975, during the sale by Sotheby's of the contents

From 1977 to 1979 a handful of TM staff lived there, until in early 1979 Maharishi moved about a hundred young men, all TM teachers, to the property. Mentmore was set up as the UK seat of the World Government for the Age of Enlightenment and used as the launching point to establish City Parliaments in most of the UK's larger cities. For roughly three years (1979 through 1982) the Towers saw an immense level of activity with numerous banquets to woo the UK's rich and famous. A number of laboratories were built in the former servants' wing and used for TM research. These operated under the name Maharishi European Research University or MERU. Several series of seminars were run, aimed at inspiring academics, principally from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, to do research on TM. Visiting speakers included Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson, Professor Ilya Prigogine, Hans Eysenck, and many other leading international academics.

In 1982 Mentmore's role was changed to become the home of the University of Natural Law. A few years later it was transformed again, to be the UK headquarters of the Natural Law Party. In a search for sources of income, the TM organisation ran a number of businesses out of Mentmore (including making fudge, selling silk dresses, hosting classical music concerts and using the building as a film location). After 1982 the number of staff at Mentmore decreased to about thirty until the building was sold.

The Gold Room, formerly the white drawing room with a specially designed modern carpet mirroring the ceiling plasterwork

In 1997 Mentmore Towers was sold to a company, owned by Simon Halabi, now named Mentmore Towers Ltd, that, while restoring it, plans to turn it into a luxury hotel with 101 suites, including 62 in a new wing on the slope below the house^[1]. However, in September 2004 a local resident won a last-minute injunction in the High Court to halt work on the hotel while a judicial review investigated if the planning permission granted had followed the correct procedures. In March 2005 the High Court ruled that Aylesbury Vale District Council's decision to grant planning permission to the developers was "unimpeachable" and legally sound.

In the last few years the house has appeared in many films, most memorably Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Other films that have used the location include Terry Gilliam's Brazil and The Mummy. In Batman Begins, Mentmore Towers was used as the gothic Wayne Manor. The Spice Girls recorded a 1999 music video on the grand marble staircase. It also served as the filming location of the music video to Enya's "Only If...".

The Marble Staircase

1. ^ EPR Architects, Mentmore Towers - accessed 22 September 2006.

• Rothschild properties in Buckinghamshire

• Mentmore Golf and Country Club