Inside the aristocratic holiday rentals where you can (temporarily) play lord of the manor

If you’ve never received a coveted invitation to dine or even stay in one of the UK’s grand country houses, there’s now an easy way to get your foot — literally — in the door.

In recent years, estates, the majority still privately owned, have been throwing open the doors to their homes to one and all. Even royalty is at it — when The King was Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, he stayed in Restormel Manor near Lostwithiel, part of the Duchy estate and a holiday let available to the public that can accommodate up to 18 people.

In Wales, holidaymakers could, until recently, choose between two cottages that adjoined the royal couple’s Welsh home — the Llwynywermod estate in Myddfai, Wales, when His Majesty was not in residence. (In 2023, The King announced that he was giving up the lease because he did not have enough time to make proper use of and enjoy the estate.)

In the late 1970s, Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, made waves when she opened the Chatsworth Farm Shop — one of the first aristocratic ventures of its kind and a prime example of a great family diversifying to help fund their sprawling demesne. The late Duchess’s son and daughter-in-law, the 12th Duke and Duchess, have followed in her footsteps, opening The Hall at Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire — part of the ducal estate — to exclusive-use hire in 2022, the first time The Hall has been open to the public in any capacity. The 12-room, 14th-century former gatehouse, reimagined by interior designer Rita Konig, comes with access to 28,000 acres and views of the 12th-century Bolton Priory Church and ruins (above).

In fact, there’s such demand for holidays of this kind that HeritageXplore has collaborated on a series of bespoke itineraries with aristocratic families up and down the UK, offering visitors the opportunity to explore the estates and their gardens in private, away from the crowds.

Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire

There are four lodges and one house available to rent on the Belvoir estate (where HeritageXplore founder Violet Lindesay-Bethune, Viscountess Garnock, grew up) — as well as a popular glamping site. Vale House is one of the more recent additions, a nine-bedroom building part of a former engine yard that was commissioned from James Wyatt, who also built and designed the present-day Belvoir Castle (the fourth iteration on the site since William the Conqueror gifted the land to the Manners family’s first recorded ancestor, Robert de Todeni, in the 11th century). The yard had sat empty and redundant for more than 70 years, before Emma, 11th Duchess of Rutland decided to breathe life into it, transforming the remnants into a butcher, baker and farm shop respectively, with Vale House, which she personally redesigned, at its centre.

The holiday lets were popular, with listeners of Belvoir’s podcast, Duchess, in particular. The podcast — which first aired in 2021 — went behind the scenes of some of the UK’s most well-known privately owned country houses and estates and met the women responsible for running them. It was hosted by the Duchess herself and produced and directed by her daughter. Its success, the latter explained, is partly because of the worldwide appetite for things that the UK has in spades. ‘Look at the money that Netflix and Amazon are piling into all things Pride and Prejudice-esque,’ she says. ‘The Crown, Bridgerton, Emma. I think private heritage was perhaps a bit slow in catching onto the huge national and international interest and fascination with what they are custodians of.’

Bradford estates, Staffordshire

For weeks after it opened to guests for the first time, Charlotte’s Folly was the darling of Instagram, its eye-catching, rusty-rose-pink exterior and Emma Ainscough interiors flashing up on everyone’s ‘For you’ page, begging the question: ‘Where is this house and can I live in it?’ Well, no, but you can stay in it temporarily, courtesy of the Viscount and Viscountess Newport, who run the Bradford estate on which it sits.

The 12,000-acre estate, which straddles the Shropshire and Staffordshire borders, also includes the Newports’ ancestral seat Weston Park, 1,000 acres of Capability Brown-designed parkland and the White Sitch, a 19th-century pleasure ground.

It was to this pleasure ground that Lady Charlotte (daughter of the 2nd Earl of Bradford and great-great-great-great aunt of Alexander, Lord Newport), would walk from the main house, down a tree-lined woodland carriageway and via the folly. The latter shows up on maps dating as far back as the 1880s, but when the Newports decided to restore it, in the depths of lockdown, it was covered in questionable 1960s pebbledash. The couple managed to recover some of its original features, but had to guess at the exterior colour. ‘It was built as a folly, but it didn’t have a true purpose, it was simply there to be beautiful… so we imagined it to have been some crazy colour,’ explains Eliza, Lady Newport.

The interiors were entrusted to Emma — a young, up-and-coming interior designer whose style had already caught the Newports’ eyes. She could, the Viscountess explains, embrace the cottage’s ‘cuteness’ without getting bogged down by it. Diamond mullioned windows and Gothic door arches are cleverly contrasted against a leopard-print hair fender, cream bouclé sofa and kitsch checkerboard tiles; colour and pattern warmly embraced.

The folly’s namesake was a woman who lived a life far more exciting than her time and rank might suggest, who would surely approve of such a renovation. Lady Charlotte, a keen watercolourist, drove her own carriage around the estate and was an early adopter of photography. In her diaries, she writes about exploring the White Sitch and a tree that was brutally struck by lightning. ‘I swear I know which tree it is!’ exclaims Lady Newport. ‘There is a stump there.’

A second property on the estate, a Hansel and Gretel-style cottage called Hansa, is also available as a holiday let and the Newports have plans to develop more of the buildings, as well as an intricately carved wooden boathouse in their care.

West Barsham estate, Norfolk

Covering some 2,500 acres just off the north Norfolk coast, the West Barsham estate has been owned and farmed by the Soames family for three generations and counting. The current custodians are Jeremy and Susanna and their three children, Gemma, Archie and Flora. In a happy twist of fate, they were able to buy back a cluster of farmyard buildings from a property developer two years ago. The mid-19th-century barns — in which the Suffolk Punch horses that helped farm the land until the 1960s once sheltered — were renovated by interior designer Flora over a six-month period. There are six in total, sleeping between four and 14 people and available to rent on a self-catering basis; Meadow House, in which Flora and her two siblings grew up, has seven bedrooms. Gemma’s favourite is Greys Court, the former stables, framed by wildflower meadows and with views across to a medieval church.

Beyond the barn walls, the majority of the wider estate is still a working farm — wheat, barley, oilseed rape, sugar beet and vegetables, grown largely for a domestic market. A few animals graze the available grassy areas; there’s also 140 acres of woodlands and, most impressively, 280 acres of completely untouched marshland, a safe haven for kingfishers, tufted ducks, lapwings and egrets.

‘Our corner of Norfolk is known particularly for its extraordinary birdlife,’ notes Gemma — indeed, the barns are on the migratory path of Norfolk’s famous pink-footed geese and huge flocks of greylag geese that ‘come and feast on our sugar-beet tops’. Owl boxes, installed around the estate, have been as popular as the barns themselves, attracting barn owls in pleasing numbers.