The nominee pays for their own private living expenses when in residence but government departments arrange and effect official business at the estate.

The present 15-bedroomed house is a three-storey, symmetrical red brick structure in the early English Palladian style, attributed to Inigo Jones, set at the foot of the North Downs in extensive parkland.

Much remodelled by the 3rd Earl Stanhope in the late 18th-century, the house was extensively restored in the 1970s by Donald Insall Associates for the Board of Trustees of the Chevening Estate.

The Rt Hon Edward Stanhope (Conservative) was a reforming Secretary of State for War (1887–1892), while the 1st Lord Weardale (Liberal) was president of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1912–22) and of the Save the Children Fund.

The ownership of the property would pass to a board of trustees, who would maintain it as a furnished country residence for a suitably qualified nominated person chosen by the prime minister.

According to his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby (for whom Prince Charles arranged access to unpublished royal diaries and family correspondence), at that time he was contemplating an eventual marriage to Hon.

"[8] Amanda's paternal great-aunt had been Lady Eileen Browne, daughter of the 6th Marquess of Sligo, whose childless marriage to the last Earl Stanhope led to Chevening's being designated by law as a potential home for a member of Britain's royal family.

By then, according to Dimbleby, Amanda Knatchbull, several of whose close family members had been recently murdered, had declined the Prince's proposal of marriage,[10] and he would soon begin courtship of Lady Diana Spencer.

[11] Under the terms of the Chevening Act, the prime minister has the responsibility of nominating a person to occupy the house privately as a furnished country residence.

The Canadian high commissioner, the American ambassador and the National Trust all have remainder interests in Chevening in the unlikely event that none of the others requires the house.

His poetry collection The Coming-Down Time (Shoestring Press, 2020)[12] includes a sequence entitled 'Chevening', partially set in the grounds of Chevening House and in St Botolph's church opposite.