The Rothschilds’ Waddesdon Manor

When I was in London in October, I visited Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild weekend house in Buckinghamshire. I’d been once, about 30 years ago, to see the Starhemberg service, the magnificent Sèvres dinner and dessert service commissioned by Louis XV in the 1760s. It had just come to Waddesdon, a National Trust house, in lieu of death duties, and the house had just reopened after a long renovation. Thirty years is a long time, and Waddesdon’s a trove of great painting, furniture, porcelain, silver, and, of course, architecture. Built in the late 1870s from scratch by Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898), it’s in a French Renaissance château style that, having collided with high Victorian taste, combusted into a unique caprice.

There’s a lot to experience. The once revered National Trust, owning 500 properties in the U.K., is a hardened pellet of woke ideology now. I wondered as well if that has affected Waddesdon. It’s good news to see it hasn’t. This isn’t necessarily a Christmas story. The Rothschilds are, by and large, Jews. Still, Waddesdon has the Christmas spirit, and if hearth and home are part of Christmas, there’s no house that does a full-bodied plush snug as this.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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When I was in London in October, I visited Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild weekend house in Buckinghamshire. I’d been once, about 30 years ago, to see the Starhemberg service, the magnificent Sèvres dinner and dessert service commissioned by Louis XV in the 1760s. It had just come to Waddesdon, a National Trust house, in lieu of death duties, and the house had just reopened after a long renovation. Thirty years is a long time, and Waddesdon’s a trove of great painting, furniture, porcelain, silver, and, of course, architecture. Built in the late 1870s from scratch by Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898), it’s in a French Renaissance château style that, having collided with high Victorian taste, combusted into a unique caprice.

There’s a lot to experience. The once revered National Trust, owning 500 properties in the U.K., is a hardened pellet of woke ideology now. I wondered as well if that has affected Waddesdon. It’s good news to see it hasn’t. This isn’t necessarily a Christmas story. The Rothschilds are, by and large, Jews. Still, Waddesdon has the Christmas spirit, and if hearth and home are part of Christmas, there’s no house that does a full-bodied plush snug as this.