Things to do in Buckinghamshire

Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire is one of the most extraordinary country houses in Britain, a French Renaissance château transported wholesale to the rolling English countryside and filled with one of the finest collections of French decorative arts outside France. Built for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild between 1874 and 1889 to designs by the French architect Hippolyte-Alexandre Destailleur, the house represented the Rothschild family's determination to create an English country seat that matched the grandeur of the great French royal residences they admired, and the result is a building of startling ambition and consummate quality. The exterior, modelled on the Loire Valley châteaux of the sixteenth century, rises from a hilltop that was entirely reshaped to receive it, the summit removed and rebuilt on a platform of unprecedented engineering complexity. Full-grown mature trees were transported by horse and steam traction up the reconfigured hillside to provide an instant mature landscape around a brand new building, a feat of horticulture and logistics that speaks clearly to the scale of the resources the Rothschilds were prepared to deploy. The result, when seen across the surrounding parkland, is genuinely impressive: a perfect French château sitting within an English park as if it had always been there. The interior contains one of the greatest collections of eighteenth-century French decorative arts in the world, assembled by successive generations of the Rothschild family with knowledge, access and financial resources that enabled them to acquire pieces of royal provenance and museum quality. Furniture made for the French royal apartments, Sèvres porcelain of the finest quality, Savonnerie carpets woven for the great French palaces and portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney hang and stand in rooms furnished to a standard that reflects both the quality of the objects and the skill of the interior decorators who arranged them. The parterre gardens below the south front and the rococo-style aviary containing exotic birds are among the most visited features of the gardens, and the wine cellars contain one of the most significant collections of historic vintages in private hands in Britain.