By Tori Reeve, Exhibition Designer and Curator
When Sir Philip Sassoon inherited Trent Park estate in 1912, he found much to admire in the beautiful Humphry Repton-designed landscape, but he had a less than favourable impression of the Victorian mansion block at its heart. In the 1920s he used his considerable wealth to completely remodel the old mansion block, then decorate and furnish it to his taste.
Known as something of an aesthete, Sir Philip sought out the best Georgian furniture for his new house, lacquered and painted pieces positioned in rooms bathed in elegant shades of warm parchment, soft green and eau de nil.
The result was a house of great refinement and cool simplicity, and the perfect weekend party venue for Sir Philip’s illustrious social circle that included every great name of the age, from Churchill to Chaplin. In the words of Christopher Hussey, writing for Country Life in 1931, Sir Philip had transformed Trent Park into ‘the spirit of a country house... an essence of cool, flowery, chintzy, elegant, unobtrusive rooms that rises in the mind when we are thinking of country houses.’
When Trent Park House opens its doors in 2026, our visitors will step across the threshold into the world of Sir Philip Sassoon once more, to a suite of fine rooms carefully returned to their 1930s glory.
But what does it take to complete such a restoration? And what are the challenges facing the curatorial team bringing this to fruition?
The first task is to closely examine what we have left, the secrets the building leaves for us to discover under many layers of paint built up over a century of varied occupation from wartime intelligence centre to teacher training college and latterly, as the home of Middlesex Polytechnic. Scientific analysis of these paint layers has helped us to identify the Sassoon colour scheme in many of the rooms, and we can corroborate our findings with source material which documents the rooms in photographs, written articles and memoirs of Sir Philip’s contemporaries, who visited Trent Park as weekend party guests.
One of our key sources is an article published in Country Life in 1931, in which the principal rooms are described in detail, and illustrated with a series of black and white photographs. From these images we can precisely pinpoint the layout of furniture and furnishing while the written room descriptions bring the monochrome photographs into full colour.
This is where curatorial excitement really takes hold as from this point we begin to research and locate original furniture, source antique pieces and trawl the archives of fabric specialists to match the prints and patterns we are looking for.
When it comes to the furniture documented in the photographs of Sir Philip’s fine rooms, it is fortunate that many items have remained within the Sassoon family and are now at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the ancestral home of Sir Philip’s great-nephew, the Marquess of Cholmondeley. As co-chair of Trent Park Museum Trust, Lord Cholmondeley has been instrumental in supporting the restoration of the historic interiors and much of the original furniture will be returning on loan to Sir Philip’s fine rooms once more.
Two remarkable survivals remain intact at Trent Park. The first are the panels of hand-painted Chinese wallpaper which graced the walls of Sir Philip’s Drawing Room and will be conserved and reinstated once the building works at the mansion are complete. The second survival is a campaign of painted monograms and motifs by Rex Whistler we find scattered throughout many of the ground floor rooms. Whistler was a frequent guest of Sir Philip’s throughout the 1930s, and his legacy will live on in his decorations, which have been carefully conserved.
At every step of the journey to refine the interior schemes and reinstate Sir Philip’s country house, we also plan for the new life that Trent Park House will have as a museum ready to embrace our future visitors. A crucial part of this is to develop the narrative journey and decide how best to communicate the story of the people who lived and worked here in an engaging, immersive and interactive way for all our future audiences. In parallel to this we consider all the practicalities of the visitor journey, such as ticketing and retail, providing a café and restrooms, ensuring that our visitor route is accessible to all, and that the power and data infrastructure is in place to support every part of the visitor journey.
As the project to open Trent Park House unfolds in the coming months, we look forward to taking you on the journey with us. Follow along for a glimpse behind-the-scenes at the work of our dedicated conservators and curtain makers, decorators and upholsterers, architects and exhibition designers, using their skills and expertise to bring Trent Park back to life.
