The UK's most eccentric home

FROM the Kama Sutra murals in the bedroom, to the 1000 animal safari park, and the “wifelets” swanning about the property, it’s clear Longleat is no stuffy, stately home.
The British mansion has been in the same family for 14 generations, and is currently presided over by the seventh Marquess of Bath, Alexander Thynn, an 83-year-old eccentric Lord who drinks red wine by the pint glass, and has 73 “wifelets”.
“Girlfriends expected to be called a little more than a girlfriend, and it was wrong to say they were wives, so wifelets became a term,” he explains, while being filmed as part of a BBC documentary.
All Change at Longleat takes viewers behind the scenes of the family who live on the $400 million estate, as they adjust to handing the property down to Alexander’s son Ceawlin.
But with Lord Bath insisting he’s not on the “discard shelf yet”, there is plenty of drama, with the program interviewing many of the estate’s residents and visitors, including some of the wifelets.
They include former Bond girl and self-described “chocolate woman” Sylvana, immortalised as number 13 in a series of paintings that document the women in the order he met them.
The sprawling estate, which costs more than $6 million a year to run, will soon be managed by Ceawlin, known as the Viscount, and his wife Emma, as they start a family of their own.
But it hasn’t been all happy families for the extraordinary personalities involved. A bitter feud erupted after the comparatively straitlaced Ceawlin decided to paint over some of Lord Bath’s famed Kama Sutra murals as he refurbished parts of the home for his new wife.
“There was a moment when I realised I couldn’t be looking at the same walls pushing 40 as I was before” Ceawlin said.
“The consequence was that it caused a major rift between my father and me.”
The fight meant Lord Bath boycotted his son’s 400-guest wedding, even though it was held on the property.
Meanwhile another rift with Ceawlin’s mother came to a head after she allegedly said the birth of Ceawlin’s son would ruin “400 years of bloodline” because his wife Emma is half-Nigerian.
The extraordinary scenes are just part of the daily life for the family, which has a vast estate to run that includes 400 staff, a 1000-animal safari park and a nearby village including a pub, school and houses, which they rent out to locals.
Safari park ranger Andy says he works in a “very odd place”.
“I think it’s an eccentric place full of eccentrics but nowhere is even remotely like this place,” he said.
For Emma, life in her new home with the title Lady Weymouth has been “quite daunting” due to the sudden media attention, family dynamics and thousands of visitors each year.
But despite her nightmare in-laws, she appears a trooper, baking cakes for the village fete and fretting about whether the locals like them, while Ceawlin tries to drag the Downton Abbey-style estate into the 21st century.
The final episode is yet to air in the UK, so the family doesn’t know how audiences will react. But the couple are relieved to have the filming over. Ceawlin said he was worried about the editing process and how they might appear on camera.
“You have no control and don’t have any influence really on what is shown; you’re putting your faith in the director and I had nerves about taking that leap,” he told The Wiltshire Times.
“I found it very stressful being in front of a camera and I’ve no idea if it will change things for us but it’s probably going to be quite game-changing in some ways but we will have to see what happens.”