Chippemdale castle saved by Prince Charles

Prince saves jewel in Scots crown

£45m raised to keep Dumfries House - and its unique Chippendale collection - from being sold and split up

Severin Carrell and Maev Kennedy
Thursday June 28, 2007
The Guardian

One of Britain's most significant architectural jewels, a stately home near Glasgow which boasts a unique collection of Chippendale furniture, has been saved for the nation after a last-minute intervention by Prince Charles.

He engineered a £45m deal to prevent Dumfries House in East Ayrshire and its contents from being split up and sold off by its owner, the Marquess of Bute.

David Barrie, the director of the Art Fund, which launched a national fundraising campaign backed by its largest ever grant, of £2.5m, said: "This is an extraordinarily unique survivor. It's an intact house with contents from the 1750s of the highest quality. When it's opened to the public, it will be absolutely jaw-dropping. Everybody said that saving it was impossible, but we've proved it could be done. We've just saved it at the 11th hour, the 59th minute and the 59th second."

Mr Barrie described the house as a sleeping giant. "It's an absolute jewel of architecture - designed by the Adam brothers. Its original contents represent the absolute height of taste and fashion of the 1750s." The building - a Palladian masterpiece designed in the 1750s by John, Robert and James Adam, the pre-eminent architects of the Scottish Enlightenment - was due to have been sold by private auction yesterday along with 1,945 acres of landscaped grounds and farmland.

The collection of early Thomas Chippendale furniture, made for the building and regarded as the most significant single collection of early Chippendale work in the world, was then to have been the centrepiece of an auction of its contents at Christie's in London in mid-July. The house and its contents have remained in miraculously unaltered condition because for long periods it was never lived in, the maintenance work scrupulously done but the building left shuttered and locked, so that original furnishings and fabrics remained fresh and unfaded.

Yesterday it emerged that the prince guaranteed a £20m loan which was raised by his charitable trust, enabling the campaign fund originally set up by heritage activists to find the £45m needed and stop the sale.

The last piece of the funding jigsaw - a £5m grant from Historic Scotland - only came in on Monday night. Campaigners originally estimated they would need to raise at least £35m to stop the house and its furniture being sold off. Increasingly frantic efforts to prevent its sale by Save Britain's Heritage - which originally audaciously offered to buy the whole estate without any notion of how to pay for it - and the Art Fund seemed doomed to failure.

The deal, which is expected to see the house opened to the public for the first time next year, includes the purchase of its entire contents, the house and grounds, and a 66-acre plot of development land where the prince hopes to build a new village to help pay off the loan, adjoining land he already owns. The £45m cost, which includes the expense of running the property and opening it to the public, was reached after several independent valuations.

Despite its significance and rarity, Dumfries House was barely known outside architectural circles - and even most historians only knew the interiors from a set of black and white photographs taken over half a century ago. Clive Aslet, the architectural historian and editor of Country Life, spent 30 years trying to get in to see it - and described the threatened sale as the greatest heritage disaster in decades.

The marquess, Johnny Bute, a former racing driver whose main home is on the Isle of Bute, announced plans to sell the building in 2004, saying it was no longer financially tenable for his family to maintain a property they so rarely used.

Negotiations with the Scottish National Trust collapsed, and it seemed inevitable that the estate would be broken up and the collection scattered: since the Christie's auction was announced, inquiries have come in from all over the world.

The house was described by Marcus Binney, president of Save Britain's Heritage, as "exquisitely built and perfectly symmetrical in plan". Its furniture spanned "the full range of kit that could be bought or commissioned from England's most famous cabinet maker."

The threatened loss of the house was seen as a heritage disaster on the scale of Mentmore: the palatial Buckinghamshire house and its sumptuous contents were offered to the nation in the 1970s in lieu of death duties, but rejected by the government. They were then scattered at auction for 10 times the amount owed in taxes.

This time, a £7m grant came from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, which was set up as a fund of last resort in the wake of the Mentmore fiasco; the Garfield Weston foundation gave £1m, and the Monuments Fund charity first offered £4m, and then more than doubled that when it looked as if the funding gap was unbridgeable. More than £1,000 and 1,000 signatures were also collected in two afternoons from passersby in the high street of the nearby town of Cumnock.

Prince Charles's deputy private secretary, Mark Leishman, said the prince was worried that unless it was saved, Dumfries House could suffer the same fate as other great buildings - being dismantled, neglected or even destroyed.

The prince now wanted the property to become an "engine" for economic regeneration in the area, helping to create new craft-based enterprises as well as the tourism spin-offs for local businesses. It was not seen as part of his often controversial campaign to protect classical British architecture.