In 1684 an attempt was made by Mary Keightley in the Court of Chancery to sequester this share of the estate from him to recover a debt,[8] however, after the death of his first wife, he married the plaintiff, and the case seems to have been resolved.

[9] The three-quarter share of the estate passed down through the Long family to Catherine Tylney-Long,[10] a wealthy early seventeenth-century heiress courted by the Prince of Wales, who later married William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley, 4th Earl of Mornington.

[citation needed] In 1890, the house and a limited area of land, but not the larger part of the surrounding farmland, was acquired by the antiquarian Alfred de Lafontaine.

However, this meant that it had not seen the modernisation applied to many other country houses in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and retained many original Tudor characteristics including an almost unaltered facade (though the gatehouse had been near collapse and was demolished by the Woods).

Lafontaine followed this approach, cleaning and repairing rather than altering, and where he installed modern amenities he did so sensitively, with trench heating under elegant iron grilles in the historic rooms.

Lafontaine put the house up for sale in 1916 and two years later it was purchased by the Cochrane family, who built the current North Wing in 1920–21 on the site of earlier structures.

In 1949 it was purchased by Rodney Philipps, who lived there with his wife Marika and her mother Marevna, the Russian-French painter who produced a number of paintings of Athelhampton at this time.

[14] The magnificent Elizabethan kitchen, whose range had been bricked in and concealed behind modern units, has been restored and opened to the public for the first time, and many other historic rooms previously closed are now available to visit, with new lighting installed for the hammerbeam roof in the Great Hall.

Furniture, lighting, soft furnishings and finishes include work by one of the country's last traditional weavers and by local blacksmiths, stonemasons and joiners, alongside items from the Tudor and later periods.

Concealed solar panels and batteries, powering heat pumps, have allowed the removal of gas and oil and the estate now has net zero carbon emissions from current energy usage.

[17] At Athelhampton, he drew these influences together in a way that he later described in a 1900 article,[18] in which he argued that the three chief characteristics of old gardens were enclosure, subdivision, and change of level: "As you have the dining room, library and gallery, so out of doors there was one court for guests to alight in, another for flowers and a third for the lawn game of the period."

Thomas defined a third axis, running parallel to the second along the middle of the rectangular lily pond and meeting the house at the centre of its East facade (which Lafontaine had made symmetric by adding an extra tower).

To the east, the Lime Walk runs parallel to the second axis and flowers magnificently in Spring, and beyond that the great Kitchen Garden is also aligned with the axes, and creates a further, large.

Parts but not all of Mawson's plans were carried out, notably the long Yew Alley that runs south from the West Lawn, near the ancient dovecote.

Along the side of the River Piddle, which forms the northern boundary of the formal gardens, an embankment was built that creates a waterside walkway connecting the core of Thomas' design, on the east of the house, with the Mawson areas to the west.