'Mine was the peacock room,' wrote Rupert Uloth in Country Life in 1995. 'I could have had the Turnbull and Asser room, its walls covered in striped shirt material, or even the Wedgwood room, in blue and white. The Nina Campbell suite, on three levels, is the one to go for If you really want to spoil yourself.'
Rupert was writing about one of the most extraordinary buildings in the Midlands: Stapleford Park, a Grade I-listed country house of some 36,000 square feet set in 54 acres near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. Back in 1995, Stapleford Park was run as a country-house hotel, the brainchild of an American entrepreneur called Bob Payton. It was just the latest chapter in the story of an iconic country pile. The next chapter is about to begin, for the hotel's last guests checked out in 2024, and the whole place is now for sale with Strutt & Parker at £18 million.
This will be the first time that Stapleford has changed hands in 40 years, but that actually counts as a pretty quick turnover by the house's former standards. Before Payton took over it had been owned by the Gretton family, who'd made a fortune in brewing beer, and bought the place to use as a lavish country house for entertaining guests. The Grettons had owned it since 1894, having picked it up a few years after the Sherard family — also known as the Earls of Harborough — had died out.
As for the Sherards? They had been here since 1402.
The Sherards built a house here in about 1500, but — according to Giles Worsley's article in Country Life in 1988 — the oldest parts of the building as it currently stands date to the work done in 1633.
Further changes were made in the 18th century — when Capability Brown was brought in to landscape the surroundings — before Gretton used the fortune he'd made at the iconic Bass beer brand to employ the architect J. T. Micklethwaite. The brief was simple: turn Stapleford into a magnificent and luxurious country home.
Gretton died before his vision could be completed and his heirs eventually turned it into a visitor attraction, with miniature railway (still running today) and a wild animal enclosure (long gone). Not until Payton's purchase, and £4 million of further investment, did it become the palatial house that Gretton had imagined.
That is more or less the state that you'll find Stapleford in today, for in essence this magnificent house — which is about as close as you'll find to Leicestershire's answer to Versailles — isn't really a country house in the traditional sense.
There is a wellness centre, for example, with seven treatment rooms, a pavilion with changing rooms, four tennis courts and more. As well as the bedrooms — all 48 of them in the main house — there are four cottages within the 54 acres.
The big question here is 'what happens next?' It'd certainly be possible to get Stapleford Park up and running in the hospitality industry once more, but the potential is there for many other options.
‘Although the blueprint is here to revive a country-house-hotel business, or create an exclusive country members club, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to restore the house to a private dwelling, should there be the appetite,’ says Mark Rimell, director of Strutt & Parker’s National Country House Department.
He's right: all it needs is a new owner with the vision to make that happen. And the deep pockets to allow them to do so.
Stapleford Park is for sale through Strutt & Parker — see more details.