Farleigh Wallop

Farleigh Wallop

A secluded retreat, perfect for house parties, events and weekends away.

Just over an hour’s journey from London, Farleigh House and its grounds, owned and tended by the same family since the 15th Century, are perfect to hire for private events, or a family get together, corporate events, weddings and shooting parties, as well as for exclusive-use holidays.

Your break will include all meals, drinks, service and facilities of this 4,000-acre Hampshire estate. The house, set back from the road and hidden by woodland, is a storied English home whose interior has been recently redesigned, refurbished and fitted with state-of-the-art amenities whilst preserving its inherent heritage.

It is a luxurious, exclusive retreat where you can host your event in quintessentially English surroundings. Hidden from the road by lush woodland and a high garden wall, it is completely private.

The house has eight reception rooms, all unique in character, size views. The main dining room is ideal for intimate lunches, grand dinners or an opulent reception for up to 40. With a large, airy country kitchen, as well as a commercial kitchen to cater for large parties, the house lends itself to entertainment.

Eleven guest bedrooms and nine bathrooms provide beautifully-appointed accommodation for family and friends.

Day or night, we can host entertainment of all varieties, with space for music and dancing indoors, outdoors and poolside. We have a bespoke marquee zone adjacent to the house where we can look after larger parties.

Estate Details

• A spectacular setting, deep in Jane Austen country.
• Eleven elegant suites and bedrooms (sleeps 21).
• Four spacious reception rooms, and two cosy ones, all with majestic views onto unspoiled landscape.
• Ten acres of gardens that can accommodate up to 250 guests in marquees.
• Grounds that feature a boating lake, an orchard, ornamental ponds, a kitchen garden, a rose garden and a serpentine walk.
• Newly installed guest and professional-standard kitchens.
• Tennis court
• Heated outside swimming pool, opened May to September depending on the climate
• Croquet lawn and cricket pitch with pavilion.
• Cinema room
• Billiard room.
• Wine cellar.
• Home to the Farleigh Shoot

The Gardens at Farleigh Wallop

Lovingly cultivated, curated and cared for over many years
The gardens at Farleigh Wallop are a continually changing place of contemplation and beauty, commissioned by Lord and Lady Portsmouth in 1992 from renowned garden designer Georgia Langton.

A three-acre walled garden is divided by yew hedges into formal ‘rooms’. An ornamental potager combines herbaceous borders with vegetable beds which, with the cuttings garden, supply the house with flowers throughout the year.

The kitchen garden is lovingly tended all year, and provides fresh produce for the house, where it is prepared for the lunches and dinners that our guests enjoy.
In the elegant glasshouse, a riot of rainbow colours and interwoven vines, the air is heavy with the scent of flowers from faraway lands.

The classic English style of the rose garden creates a pleasing contrast with the contemporary wild rose and sculpture garden. A ha-ha at the end of the croquet lawn leads the eye from the gardens to the parkland, fields and woods beyond.

A serpentine walk garlanded with fragrant shrubs finishes at a sculpture pond that evokes the serenity of Japanese ornamental gardens. Beyond this lie wrought-iron gates that open onto a lake, home to koi carp and golden orfe. Moored by the jetty is a boat (Leaky) perfect for gently sculling around the lake’s central island.

Nestled away in the Hampshire countryside, yet close to a wealth of cultural, historical and sporting venues.

Nearby events –

• Ascot: horse racing, with Royal Ascot in June (29 miles)

• Henley Regatta (30 miles)

• Goodwood: Revival, Festival of Speed and horse racing (37 miles)

• Wimbledon: tennis (53 miles)

• Thruxton race circuit (26 miles)

• Winchester: Medieval city, Cathedral, Christmas market (17 miles)

• Windsor: home to Windsor Castle and close to Eton College (35 miles)

• Highclere Castle: tours of the real Downton Abbey (18 miles)

• Portsmouth: Nelson’s HMS Victory, HMS Warrior and the Mary Rose Museum at the
Historic Dockyard. Emirates Spinnaker (viewing) Tower and Gunwharf Keys shopping outlet (48 miles)

• Southampton cruise departures (30 miles)

• Farnborough Air Show (21 miles)

• Opera at the Grange Festival (9 miles)

• London (50 miles)

• Stonehenge (37 miles)

• National Motor Museum, Beaulieu (40 miles)

• Jane Austen’s House Museum (10 miles)

• Chichester Festival Theatre (48 miles)

• Fly fishing on the River Test (18 miles)

• Alresford: market town (11 miles)

• Odiham: Castle and canal river boat trips (12 miles)

• Bird World (21 miles)

• Bowling (5 miles)

• Cinema (5 miles)

• Football matches: Madejski Stadium, Reading (19 miles), St Mary’s Stadium,
Southampton (29 miles)

• Cricket: Ageas Bowl (32 miles)

• Ice Hockey: watch the Basingstoke Bisons (5 miles)

• Ice Skating (5 miles)

• Vineyard and brewery tours

For children

• Alice Holt country park (16 miles)
• Queen Elizabeth country park (28 miles)
• Finkley Down Farm (19 miles)
• Legoland (33 miles)
• Thorpe Park (37 miles)
• Peppa Pig World (33 miles)
• Chessington World of Adventures (46 miles)
• Four Kingdoms Adventure Park (18 miles)
• Pottery café (2 miles)

The history of Farleigh Wallop

The story of a Great British estate

Where Farleigh House stands today, a house has stood for almost a thousand years. Shaped by the rise and fall of kings, by wars and by a family’s work and traditions, for centuries royalty, adventurers, and the day’s most celebrated personalities have feasted at Farleigh.

The building and its surrounding land has travelled through the generations either by marriage or inheritance since the Domesday Book; it has never been bought or sold in recorded history. In 1450 John Wallop inherited Farleigh House and the then Farleigh Estate from his mother, Margaret de Valognes. Apart from a period of confiscation by the Crown as a result of royal disfavour, the house and estate have always been in Wallop family hands.

Farleigh House began its tradition of hosting the greatest in the land when Sir Henry Wallop entertained Queen Elizabeth I there, though its relationship with royalty has not always been happy. Robert Wallop was a Member of Parliament during the reigns of King James I and King Charles I, a period of constitutional struggles between King and Parliament. Robert sided with Parliament throughout the Civil War, and sat in judgment on Charles I. At the Restoration of 1661 that saw King Charles II take the throne, Robert was expelled from Parliament, arrested and tried for treason. His life was spared because he had refused to sign Charles I’s death warrant, but his liberty and property were not: his estates were seized by the Crown and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Farleigh House burned down the same year; the fire, which was once thought to be an act of revenge by Charles II, is more likely to have been an accident.

Robert’s great-grandson, John Wallop, was instrumental in improving the family’s fortunes. After excelling as a soldier, a diplomat and a courtier to Kings George I and George II, he was ennobled as Viscount Lymington in 1720 and Earl of Portsmouth in 1743. Rebuilt in 1731, Farleigh House was rented to private tenants while the family lived on another of their estates, Hurstbourne Park near Whitchurch. Among its visitors at this time was Romantic poet and bon viveur Lord Byron, who returned as an adult to make merry in the house he’d visited as a schoolboy.

Farleigh House became the family seat again under Gerard Vernon Wallop, later 9th Earl of Portsmouth. An American citizen, he inherited in the late 1920s a vast acreage of land but no cash and onerous death duties to pay at a time of acute agricultural depression. Raised on a ranch in the American West and a man of simpler tastes than his forebears, he sold Hurstbourne Park and concentrated his energies on Farleigh, where he embarked on an improvement plan that included restoring the house as what he described as a “modest mansion fit for the twentieth century”. The house of today is very much the 9th Earl’s creation. Having come to admire the French chateaux he saw while fighting on the Western Front in World War I, he hired architect H. S. Goodhart-Rendel to fuse these ideas with local building styles and materials.

The 9th Earl moved in just before the outbreak of World War II and lived there for only 13 years before striking out for Kenya. The house stood empty until 1954, when it became a prep school for boys. His successor and grandson Quentin Wallop, the 10th Earl of Portsmouth, modernised the house and landscaped the garden, living at Farleigh with his family from 1989 to 2014.

The house enters a new stage of its story under the stewardship of his son, Oliver Wallop, Viscount Lymington.