Prestwold Hall

[5] 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.

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 room is overlooked by two dramatic full length portraits of Sir Edward Hussey Packe, KBE (1878 – 1946) and the Hon.

The portrait of Lady Packe, painted in 1911, was described by the art historian Robin Gibson OBE as an ‘amazing feat of virtuosity’.

The windows rise from floor level and open onto the garden which enhances the notion that Prestwold was designed in the style of an Italian classical villa.

Before Burn's reworking of the gardens in 1842 the house was set on an informal lawn with shrubberies and trees to north, east and west, and with the main entrance to the south.

The author and antiquary, John Nichols, commended Charles James Packe's ‘extensive planting’ which, ‘bosomed [the house] in calm serenity’.

As John Nichols writes in The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, Volume III, Part I, published in 1800:‘The grounds before [the house] are spacious, and possess much of a park-like appearance; and the house, in every point of view shews itself delightfully shaded with wood, being ornamented with large plantations of forest-trees; Mr Packe having, perhaps, planted and raised within the last thirty years, more trees than any gentleman in this county.’Near the house stands the Grade II* listed church of St Andrew, a medieval parish church largely rebuilt in 1890 by the architect Sir A Blomfield.

Wellington bombers, which were operated from the airfield, are very large planes without a great deal of propulsion, hence the requirement for 2000 yards of tarmac.

Electricity for the house is provided by two rows, 100 yards long, of photovoltaic panels in the walled garden producing 50 kW of power.