Wilton House

, with his 2nd wife, Lady Anne Clifford and his family, painting by Anthony van Dyck (1634–35).]] The seven state rooms contained behind the quite simple Mannerist south front of Wilton House are equal to those in any of the great houses of Britain. State rooms in English country houses were designed, named, and reserved for the use of the visiting members of the royal family. State rooms usually occupy an entire facade of a house, and are nearly always of an odd number because the largest and most lavish room (at Wilton the famed Double Cube Room) is placed at the centre of the facade, with symmetrical sequences of smaller (but still very grand) rooms leading from the central room to…

The house was recorded as Grade I listed in 1951. The house and gardens have been open to the public since that year, usually during the summer months. Wilton was described by the architectural historian Sir John Summerson in 1964 as: , the current earl, William Herbert, 18th Earl of Pembroke, and his family live in the house. In 2006, Herbert told The New York Times Magazine that the Wilton estate has around 140 employees. Its 14,000 acres are divided into 14 farms, one of which is run by the estate (the others are rented to tenants) and more than 200 residential properties. Although the house is open to the public, Herbert and his wife occupy about a third of the house privately.…