WRITTEN IN THE STARS
The first thing you need to realise about Mount Stuart is that it’s not your standard stately home. It’s grand, yes, and historic, certainly, and though there are plenty of original oil paintings and family crests, the sober atmosphere so often found in grand country houses is lacking – here it’s more one of amusement as you peruse the artefacts, at turns playful, sometimes even absurd.
But then, that was always sort of the plan wasn’t it? To create a lavish, charismatic and outrageous home, quite unlike anything anyone had seen before.
The house you see today combines two buildings. What is left of the rather more sensible Georgian property, which suffered a fire in 1877, and the extravagant
