"One of the most important late 19th century country houses in England", the mansion was built between 1884 and 1891 by George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner for Robert Windsor-Clive, later first Earl of Plymouth.
The development of the South Wales Coalfield in the 18th and 19th centuries saw their wealth greatly increase, as the coal was transported worldwide from their ports at Barry and Penarth.
At his coming of age in 1878 Robert Windsor-Clive inherited some 30,500 acres and an income from ground rents and port royalties which allowed him to undertake the building of Hewell Grange at a time when many landed aristocrats were facing retrenchment due to the Agricultural Depression.
The Welsh property was much the most valuable, the opening of the Penarth and Barry Docks for the transportation of coal brought the family immense royalties.
Gay was the daughter of Augustus Paget, a diplomat, and his German-born wife, Walburga, diarist, artist and intimate friend of Queen Victoria.
[7] Windsor-Clive held a number of, relatively minor, political offices, serving as Paymaster General under Lord Salisbury from 1890 to 1892,[8] and First Commissioner of Works under Arthur Balfour from 1902 to 1905.
[18] Windsor-Clive's first encounter with the firm of Bodley & Garner is recorded in his wife's memoir of her husband, privately published in 1932: "Although I first discussed the plans with Mr Bodley in the very small dog kennel of the Athenaeum Club, it was Mr Garner who came to see us to discuss the details and the designs from the very beginning were [his]".
[22] The building was technologically advanced; one of the first in the country to be lit by electricity[1] and with hydraulic lifts powered from the water tower in the park.
The Windsor-Clives entertained at Hewell on an appropriate scale, with guests including Lord Salisbury, the Shah of Persia, and many members of the British royal family.
Ferdinand de Rothschild, the builder of the even grander Waddesdon Manor and another Soul, suggested that Hewell was the only modern English house he really envied.
Lady Windsor, in her memoir of her husband, wrote "had we any idea how quickly the circumstances of life in this country, and indeed throughout the world, would change, I do not think that we should have dreamt of building a house of that size".
Heavy death duties forced him to sell Hewell Grange and the ground rents from his land in Barry, Penarth and Grangetown.
Alan Brooks and Nikolaus Pevsner, in their Worcestershire volume of the Buildings of England series, describe it as "perhaps the last Victorian prodigy house".
[23] A grand staircase gives access to the upper bedroom floors, including Lady Windsor's dressing room, decorated by her mother with murals evoking Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.
Its Historic England listing describes it as "an outstanding example of a late-Victorian country house, [with] an interior of remarkable quality, [that] survives substantially intact".
[38] The park contains a large number of listed buildings: three lodges, the North and South at the north-west gate,[39][40] and the Paper Mill Lodge to the south;[41] a range of estate buildings including the water tower,[42] home farm,[43] game larder,[44] ice house[45] and walled garden;[46] three bridges on the lake, one to the north,[47] one to the south[48] and a footbridge giving access to an island;[h][50] a real tennis court,[51] with two adjacent bridges;[52][53] and various ornamental features, including a temple,[54] gates to the French Garden[55] and five statues.
[56][57][58][59][60] Nikolaus Pevsner's original Worcestershire guide from 1968 records the presence in the garden of an Italian wellhead brought back by the Windsors from the Palazzo Marcello in Venice but it is no longer in situ.