The historic English house that is a world-famous school

restored at a cost of £ 27m. Walking around, it is easy to forget that Stowe is a school. Scores of experts have been consulted; the historical paint consultant Patrick Baty has worked across the project, taking paint samples for analysis, while in the state drawing room, an extraordinary feat has been pulled off thanks to textile research by Annabel Westman. Where there was once orange silk damask on the walls, wallpaper replicating the same soft, bouncy effect has been created by Zardi and Zardi.

With 400 rooms, it was not possible to restore every single one, admits Simon Wales, chief executive of Stowe House Preservation Trust.

Some, like the garter room, formerly the state bedchamber, at the western end of the great 11-room enfilade, is in the “too difficult” pile, since it is used as the school servery. Plenty of other projects await, including work to uncover a scheme of 1740s paintings by William Kent on the eastern staircase and landing, now part of a boarding house.

Since Stowe is a school as well as a visitor attraction, it takes some managing. The estate has three partners: the school, the preservation trust, and the National Trust, to whom the school gave the gardens in 1989.

The house has long been open to the public – guidebooks for Stowe exist from 1759. The Temple family first came to Stowe in 1571, when Peter Temple took a lease on the estate. In 1588, his son John bought it, and a century later it was inherited by 19-year-old Sir Richard Temple, who built an elegant pile, with north and south-facing facades, the beginnings of the house that stands today. Over the years, members of the family have successively built on, outside, and within Stowe, displaying their elaborate tastes, and displays of wealth.

After Sir Richard Temple, made Baron and then Viscount Cobham, inherited Stowe in 1697, he enlisted John Vanbrugh to restructure the house. When Cobham died, the estate

Grand designs The year that Stowe House opened as a school for 199 boys passed to his nephew Richard Grenville, later 2nd Earl Temple. When Temple died childless in 1779, Stowe passed to his nephew George Nugent-Temple- Grenville, later 1st Marquess of Buckingham, who with John Soane in 1803, inspired by Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, built the Egyptian Hall, complete with replica sarcophagus. It was here, while at school in the 1960s, that the future Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson made some of his first business phone calls, using the school payphone.

The Buckingham era marks the last years of Stowe as a successful family home, says Anna McEvoy, the house’s custodian. “About 1800 is Stowe’s heyday, and then it starts going downhill.”

The second duke had debts of£1m. In August 1848, Stowe’s contents were sold at auction, raising just £75,000. In 1922, the house was sold to what became the governors of Stowe School, and on May 11 1923 the founding headmaster JF Roxburgh welcomed the first 199 boys.

For McEvoy, Stowe’s “it factor” is in the life it contains. “It’s a living, breathing building, not a mausoleum.” Eleanor Doughty