A main entrance, a garden entrance, a luggage entrance, a business entrance, a nursery entrance and a second garden entrance for the private use of family and invalids. A principal staircase, a private family staircase, a servants’ staircase, a “bachelor’s stair”, a “young ladies’ stair” and “other Special Stairs” (purpose unspecified). Separate corridors for male and female servants, two more for the housekeeper and butler, one for the cook and another for the nurseries.
The period from the mid-1860s to 1914, which this book covers, was the era in which new country houses — about 270 of them — were being built from scratch by uninhibitedly wealthy people, British and American. While Ferdinand de Rothschild was creating Waddesdon Manor, employing his French architect Hippolyte Destailleur to pull together elements of different French châteaux, including Renaissance paneling in the billiard room of the bachelors’ wing, his cousin Alfred de Rothschild was trying to outdo him at Halton House 22 miles away, where he kept a private orchestra that he conducted with a diamond-encrusted baton.
