Prestwold Hall is a country house in Leicestershire, England, standing in of land in the parish of Prestwold. It is both a private home and a venue for weddings and events.
History
Prestwold Hall was, for many years, the seat of the Packe family. Before that time, it was the home of the Skipwith family. After the death of Major Robert Christopher Packe (born c.1783) - one time Aide-de-camp to King George III - who was killed during the Battle of Waterloo, the hall passed to his nephew George Hussey Packe who held the hall and estate until his death in 1874.
The Packe Family
Prestwold Hall has been the seat of the Packe family for over 360 years since it was acquired by Sir Christopher Packe (1595 – 1682) in 1649, shortly after the death of Charles I. He was nominated by Oliver Cromwell to be one of the sixty who were to create an Upper House, and he introduced the Humble Petition and Advice to Parliament, being an offer of hereditary monarchy to Cromwell. This was the apex of his rise to fame and fortune. The Restoration came, however, and it was remembered that Christopher, ‘Lord Packe,’ late Lord Mayor of London, had been one of the aldermen who proclaimed the abolition of the monarchy in May 1649. Regicides had been among his intimate friends. In August 1660, Packe was disqualified from holding any public office, and retired to Prestwold, where he lived to the age of 87.
In the 1760s, Charles James Packe (1726 – 1816) rebuilt the Hall, and soon after created the park around it. Standing on the northern part of the East Lawn runs a line of cedars, already in 1780 said to be of notable size. Five years after Charles William Packe (1792 – 1867) inherited Prestwold in 1837, the house was largely remodelled by the defining Scottish architect William Burn. One of his earliest English commissions, it is one of the finest examples of a William Burn house in the neoclassical style. The interior of the house is noted for its exceptional marbled plaster work in the Italian style, remarkable for both the scale and the quality of the work. Within the house, there is a notable collection of twentieth century portraiture and of eighteenth century English and European furniture. Prestwold Hall passed to the Drury-Lowe family in 1936 when Penelope Mary, the daughter of Sir Edward Hussey Packe, married John Drury Boteler Drury-Lowe (1905-1960). Drury-Lowe adopted the additional surname of Packe – his son, Simon Jasper Packe-Drury-Lowe (1938-2015) inherited the house and estate either at the death of his father in 1960, or at the death of his mother in 1981.
Prestwold Hall remains to this day the home of the Packe-Drury-Lowe family.
The Hall
The Hall was remodelled by architect William Burn in 1842–1844, incorporating the fabric of a mid-18th-century H-plan house. It was Grade I listed in 1951.
One of the finest rooms inside the house is the Entrance Hall with its richly coloured marbled plaster work in the Italian style. The painted ceiling was inspired by Raphael’s Vatican grotesques and incorporates miniature landscapes, showing the house before and after its remodelling between 1842 and 1844. Below the ceiling, wreathing the room, are small medallion busts of the poets from Chaucer to Scott, positioned in the spandrels and are likely inspired by Alberti's external arcade at the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. An arcade opens on to a vaulted corridor leading to a top lit inner hall: these spaces also marbled. Off the corridor, the cantilevered stone staircase survives from the eighteenth century house, and was given its bracketed brass balusters by William Wilkins (1751-1815) in 1805.
The Dining Room, added by Wilkins in 1805, was incorporated into the remodelling undertaken by the Scottish architect William Burn in 1842. The room is overlooked by two dramatic full length portraits of Sir Edward Hussey Packe, KBE (1878 – 1946) and the Hon. Lady Mary Sydney Packe (née Colebrooke, 1890 – 1973) by the painter Glyn Philpot RA (1844 – 1947). The portrait of Lady Packe, painted in 1911, was described by the art historian Robin Gibson OBE as an ‘amazing feat of virtuosity’. Its elongated elegance and introspective characterisation is totally without the fashion-plate vulgarity of much Edwardian portraiture. Other portraits hang in this room of the Packe family including a painting of Sir Christopher Packe (1595 – 1682) who purchased the house in the 17th century painted by Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen (1593 –1661).