About
Saltram House is one of the most complete and beautiful George II country houses in England — a magnificent creation of the Parker family set in 500 acres of landscaped garden and parkland on a wooded promontory above the River Plym, just three miles east of Plymouth city centre. The house presents a remarkable survival of the Georgian period in its fullest expression: interiors by Robert Adam, portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, original furniture, ceramics, and decorative arts accumulated by generations of a family who were at the centre of Devonshire cultural and social life for over two centuries.
The core of the house was built in the 1740s by the Parker family around an earlier Tudor structure, but it was the 1st Lord Boringdon and his wife Lady Catherine who transformed Saltram into a house of national importance in the 1770s. For the interiors of the Saloon and the Dining Room — the two grandest rooms in the house — they commissioned Robert Adam, then at the height of his powers as the supreme practitioner of the neoclassical style in British architecture and interior design. Adam's Saloon at Saltram, with its painted ceiling, patterned carpet (woven to Adam's own design), and integrated furniture and fittings, is among his finest achievements and one of the great rooms of eighteenth-century England.
The portraits at Saltram represent a collection of outstanding quality and particular human interest, assembled through a direct friendship between the Parker family and Sir Joshua Reynolds — the greatest English portrait painter of the eighteenth century and first President of the Royal Academy. Reynolds was a Devonian by birth (born at Plympton, just a few miles from Saltram) and maintained a lifelong warm relationship with the Parker family, visiting frequently and producing a series of portraits that hang in the rooms where they were painted and first admired. The collection includes some of Reynolds's most characterful and technically accomplished work, giving Saltram a personal dimension that few comparable houses can match.
The house became known to a new generation of visitors when it appeared as Norland Park in Ang Lee's acclaimed 1995 film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, its exteriors and gardens providing an ideal visual expression of the English country house world that Austen described. The film connection has drawn many visitors who discover on arrival that Saltram offers far more than a film location — that it is one of the most genuinely beautiful and humanly engaging historic houses in the west of England.
The gardens at Saltram include a series of pleasure grounds and woodland walks developed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, featuring a remarkable collection of trees including champion specimens of several species. The National Trust has managed Saltram since 1957.
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Highlights
The Robert Adam Saloon
The Saloon at Saltram, designed by Robert Adam in 1768, is among the finest neoclassical interiors in England — a unified work of art in which ceiling, carpet, furniture, mirrors, and wall treatment are integrated into a single, breathtakingly coherent decorative scheme. Adam designed every element: the painted ceiling with its delicate roundels and arabesques, the carpet woven to his own design and mirroring the ceiling pattern, the pier glasses, the pier tables, and the matching suite of chairs and sofas.
The effect is of extraordinary refinement and controlled luxury — the kind of total interior design that Adam elevated to a high art and that no subsequent practitioner has surpassed.
The Saloon is simply one of the great rooms of eighteenth-century England.
Joshua Reynolds and the Portrait Collection
Saltram holds a distinguished collection of portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds — the greatest English portrait painter of the eighteenth century and first President of the Royal Academy — acquired through a direct and warm personal friendship between Reynolds and the Parker family. Reynolds was born at Plympton, just a few miles from Saltram, and maintained a lifelong connection with the family who became among his most valued patrons.
The portraits at Saltram include some of his most characterful and technically accomplished works, including informal and affectionate depictions of the Parker family that show a very different side of Reynolds from the grand official commissions for which he is primarily known.
The Dining Room — Another Adam Masterwork
Alongside the Saloon, Robert Adam designed the Dining Room at Saltram in 1768-69, creating a second interior of exceptional quality that demonstrates his mastery of the neoclassical vocabulary in a different register — more formal and more emphatically Roman in its references, with apsed ends, niches for sculpture, and a decorative programme that draws on the antique sources Adam had studied in Rome during his Grand Tour years.
The two Adam rooms together represent one of the most complete surviving expressions of Adam's mature style in any English country house, and their combination at Saltram — a house that retained its collections and furnishings substantially intact over more than two centuries — is of the highest importance.
The Sense and Sensibility Film Connection
Saltram House appeared as Norland Park, the home of the Dashwood family, in Ang Lee's acclaimed 1995 film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility — a film that starred Emma Thompson (who also wrote the screenplay), Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman. The choice of Saltram for this role reflected the house's near-perfect expression of the English Georgian country house world that Austen observed and described with such precision and wit.
Several rooms of the house and the pleasure grounds appear in the film, and information about the filming is provided for visitors who wish to trace the locations.
The connection has introduced Saltram to a global audience who came expecting a film set and found instead a house of genuine depth and beauty.
Collections
The State Rooms and Collections
The principal rooms of Saltram House, including the Adam Saloon, the Adam Dining Room, the Chinese Chippendale Room, the Library, and the Great Kitchen, displayed with their original furnishings, Reynolds portraits, ceramics, and decorative arts — one of the most complete Georgian country house interiors in the National Trust's care.
The Pleasure Grounds and Kitchen Garden
The historic pleasure grounds, kitchen garden, and orangery surrounding the house, managed to reflect their eighteenth and nineteenth-century character with seasonal plantings and specialist garden collections.
Current Exhibitions
Annual programme of garden events, guided walks, and specialist horticultural displays making use of the parkland, pleasure grounds, and kitchen garden throughout the seasons.