Guinness family sale at Elveden Hall — how a country-house auction comes together

Even among Britain’s grand country houses, Elveden Hall is exceptional. To step past its red-brick and limestone facade in north Suffolk, as I did last month, is to step into a neo-Mughal palace of intricate cusped arches and white Carrara marble balustrades illuminated by glass domes. It is where Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, spent much of his exile, hosting shooting parties for Queen Victoria, her cousin Prince George, Duke of Cambridge and members of the British aristocracy.

Today the house, acquired in 1894 by Edward Guinness, the 1st Earl of Iveagh, a few years after floating his family’s brewing company on the London Stock Exchange, is unoccupied and in need of repair. Its doors have been prised open only for film crews (the grand entrance hall was the site of the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut) and the occasional “media event”, says its owner Edward Guinness, 4th Earl of Iveagh, who lives in more modest digs with his family elsewhere on the 22,500-acre estate.

But on September 14, Elveden Hall will open its doors a little wider, inviting catalogue-carrying members of the public for a one-day sale of its remaining furniture, hosted by the Essex saleroom Sworders. It is the second such auction since 1984. That year, Christie’s held a sale of its contents, many once owned by the maharaja, which took four days and together fetched more than £6mn.

The items in this sale are far more modest. Beyond specimens from the maharaja’s once-extensive taxidermy collection, a pony phaeton and some architectural salvage, most of the lots have come not from Elveden but from other Guinness family homes, including Farmleigh in Dublin, which was acquired by the Irish government for €29.2mn in 1999 and is now an official state guest house.

In a phone interview, Guinness says that proceeds of the sale will be used to fund ongoing refurbishments to the house. “There’s a piece of roof we’d like to do,” he says. “It’s a whole big premises; it needs looking after.”

Single-owner sales are somewhat rare — with the exception of celebrity sales — in part because many owners emptying their estates prefer to do so privately, and because few can drum up lots of sufficient value.

Luke Macdonald, head of art and estates at Sworders, says he is expecting the Elveden sale to fetch somewhere north of £300,000 — the minimum the auction house would conduct such a sale for (“half a million is preferable,” he says).

“This is on the edge,” he says. “But we knew if we had the sale here [at Elveden] it would make far more than in the saleroom and likely meet the threshold. Things will sell here that wouldn’t sell elsewhere. And things will sell for more here that wouldn’t sell for as much elsewhere.”

Apart from a few short breaks, Macdonald has been working through the house’s contents full-time since May, prying open boxes of Chippendale-style mirrors and calling in a specialist to survey the Chinese porcelain. When I visit in mid-July, the entrance hall is lined with centre tables stacked with china and the carpets that have escaped the resident moths; what was once a horse-drawn governess’s cart lies in a corridor where the in-house photographer from Sworders is painstakingly photographing each lot.

It is the “physical labour” of cataloguing those hundreds of items and checking them against house inventory lists that is the most arduous part of the job, says Macdonald.

Among the highlights are the aforementioned Chippendale-style mirrors (one, c1760, estimated at £20,000-£30,000), a trio of Ziegler carpets (est £15,000 and up) and several upholstered chairs from Howard & Sons, including what will probably be a hotly contested pair of Bridgewaters (est £4,000-£6,000).

Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, spent much of his exile here, hosting shooting parties for Queen Victoria and her cousin Prince George, Duke of Cambridge

The Howards are out of my reach, but I will be trying for a wonderfully comfortable sofa of less renowned make (having apparently learnt nothing from my previous sofa-purchasing mistake). The brown furniture is a mixed bag, but I was taken with a pair of George III satinwood secretaire cabinets with pretty lozenge-shaped glass doors, which at 253cm would show off a tall ceiling to advantage (est £5,000-£7,000). Another useful purchase would be the set of six Regency rail-back dining chairs, whose Colefax & Fowler-upholstered seats are in good nick (est £250-£350), or one of the several handsome and reasonably priced estate cupboards bound to trounce their estimates.

Except at the very top of the market, antiques rarely come with a known back-story, and having seen these lots against the grand backdrop that is Elveden certainly adds to their lustre — which is precisely what Guinness and Sworders are betting on.

Lauren Indvik is the FT’s fashion editor

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