Bowood House

Bowood is a Grade I listed Georgian country house in Wiltshire, England, that has been owned for more than 250 years by the Fitzmaurice family. The house, with interiors by Robert Adam, stands in extensive grounds which include a garden designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. It is adjacent to the village of Derry Hill, halfway between Calne and Chippenham. The greater part of the house was demolished in 1956.

Since 1754 the estate has been the seat of the Earls of Shelburne, created Marquess of Lansdowne in 1784. The ninth and present Marquess is Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice. Notable guests have included Founding Father Benjamin Franklin and Mirabeau, an early leader of the French Revolution, among others.

The first house at Bowood was built circa 1725 on the site of a hunting lodge, by the former tenant Sir Orlando Bridgeman, 2nd Baronet, who had purchased the property from the Crown. His grandfather Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, had been granted the lease by Charles II. Bridgeman got into financial strife, and in 1739 under a Chancery decree, the house and park were acquired by his principal creditor, Richard Long. In 1754 Long sold it to the first Earl of Shelburne, who engaged the architect Henry Keene to extend the house.

William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, who served as Prime Minister from 1782 to 1783, was created Marquess of Lansdowne to negotiate peace with America after the War of Independence. He furnished Bowood and his London home, Lansdowne House, with superb collections of paintings and classical sculpture, and commissioned Robert Adam to decorate the grander rooms in Bowood and to add a magnificent orangery, as well as a small menagerie for wild animals where a leopard and an orangutan were kept in the 18th century. Adam also built a fine mausoleum in the park for the first earl. Adam commissioned Benjamin Carter to sculpt chimney-pieces for the house.

In the 1770s the two parts of the house at Bowood (the "Big House" and the "Little House") were joined by the construction of an enormous drawing room.

In World War I, the 5th Marchioness set up an auxiliary Red Cross hospital in the orangery. During World War II, the Big House was first occupied by a school, then by the Royal Air Force. Afterwards it was left empty, and by 1955, it was so dilapidated that the 8th Marquess demolished it, employing architect F. Sortain Samuels to convert the Little House into a more comfortable home. Many country houses were knocked down at this period. Before it was demolished, the Adam dining room was auctioned and bought by the Lloyd's of London insurance market, which dismantled it and re-installed it as the Committee Room in its 1958 building. The room was subsequently moved in 1986 to the 11th floor of its current building, also on Lime Street in the City of London. A portico from the house was re-erected at Roath Court, Cardiff.

The mausoleum was designated as Grade I listed in 1960, and the remaining parts of the main house were given the same status in 1972.

The remaining house is still large, and the front wing is open to the public with rooms, paintings and sculpture on display. One of the rooms was the laboratory of Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen there on 1 August 1774. In the year 2000, Bowood House was designated an ACS National Historic Chemical Landmark in recognition of the importance of Priestley's discovery.