Stansted House & Park

Stansted House stands at the centre of a 2,000-acre estate of ancient forest and parkland in the South Downs National Park, on the West Sussex side of the county line. The present red-brick house was designed by Arthur Conran Blomfield and built between 1900 and 1903, on the footprint of a 1680s house lost to fire in August 1900. It became the seat of the Earls of Bessborough in 1924, and in 1983 the 10th Earl placed the estate in a charitable foundation. The state rooms are still furnished as though the family were at home.

The house is let for private parties, from a birthday dinner to a product launch. There is a formal Dining Room and three reception rooms, the Blue Drawing Room, the Music Room and the Main Hall, which can be used together or apart. The house gives its own figures as a formal dinner for 30, a reception for 150 or a dance party for 200. The Blue Drawing Room seats 50 for dinner, and the Music Room, with its fireplace and views over the fields, seats 70 for a ceremony.

Later in the evening the party can move below stairs, where the Servants' Quarters take 90 and the vaulted Crypt can be set up as a bar. On the ground floor the panelled Robert and Mary Bessborough Room opens onto the Library and the South Terrace, with views to the Solent. Larger gatherings go out onto the lawns.