Qualla: Lanhydrock House

Lanhydrock House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Otto Domes, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the night of 4 April 1881, fire started in the kitchen of Lanhydrock House. A near-gale-force wind fanned the flames along the south wing and through the central block. The owner, Thomas Agar-Robartes, the 1st Baron Robartes, watched his Jacobean house burn. His wife was inside breathing smoke. She died five days later. He died twelve months after that, of what newspapers called a broken heart. What rose from the ashes was a new house, built in the same granite, designed by the local architect Richard Coad to look Jacobean while concealing every Victorian convenience: hot and cold running water, gas lighting, central heating, a billiard room, a smoking room, and a kitchen complex laid out with the precision of a small industrial plant. The fire ended one Lanhydrock. The rebuild created the Lanhydrock the National Trust owns today.

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Image: Otto Domes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lanhydrock House: From Augustinian Priory to Jacobean House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Craven, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, Lanhydrock belonged to the Augustinian priory of St Petroc at Bodmin. When Henry VIII broke the monasteries, the estate passed into private hands. In 1620 the Truro merchant Sir Richard Robartes bought it and began building ...

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Image: Stephen Craven | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lanhydrock House: Anna Maria Hunt and the Widow's Long Stewardship

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EvaK, CC BY-SA 2.5. The estate descended in 1741 to a son of the Earl of Radnor's sister rather than to a cousin who inherited the peerage; the Robartes deliberately separated the land from the title. By the late eighteenth century Lanhydrock had passed to Anna Maria Hunt, born 1771, great-niece of ...

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Image: EvaK | CC BY-SA 2.5

Lanhydrock House: The Fire and the Rebuild

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beaulieurise, CC BY-SA 3.0. George Gilbert Scott had already worked on the house for the 1st Baron Robartes between 1857 and 1864, modernising and remodelling it. The 1st Baron had also demolished the east wing, leaving the U-shaped plan we see today. On the night of 4 April 1881, fire started in the kitche...

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Image: Beaulieurise | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lanhydrock House: Thomas, Loos, and the Long Goodbye

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The Robartes family had inherited a great house. They would lose what mattered most a generation later. Thomas Charles Agar-Robartes, 6th Viscount Clifden (the Viscountcy he succeeded to in 1899 through a distant cousin), had a son also called Thomas, born in 1880, his eldest and...

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Image: Public domain

Lanhydrock House: Today's House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Lanhydrock now welcomes over 200,000 visitors a year, one of the National Trust's ten most-visited paid properties. The public tour is among the longest in the Trust's collection: visitors walk through nursery, schoolroom, servants' bedrooms, the immense kitchen range, the formal...

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0