THE COUNTRY HOUSE REVEALED – DAN CRUICKSHANK REVEALS THE SECRETS OF SIX OF BRITAIN’S MOST FASCINATING PRIVATE HOUSES (2011) – DVD REGIONS 2 & 4

Historian Dan Cruickshank is invited through the closed doors of six of Britain’s greatest private houses in an illuminating and surprising journey through our architectural history. These fascinating buildings remain private homes and closed to the public, but their owners have allowed Dan Cruickshank to roam the corridors, tease out each home’s story – who built them, lived in them and lost them – and uncover tales of excess and profligacy, power and ambition. From the disarming Elizabethan charm of South Wraxall Manor, the classical rigour of Kinross House in Scotland and the majesty and ingenuity of Hawksmoor’s Easton Neston, to the Palladian sweep of Wentworth Woodhouse with its 600-foot frontage, the Victorian exuberance of Clandeboye and the Edwardian ingenuity of Lutyens’ Marsh Court, the secrets of these houses reveal not only the story of our architecture, but also reflect the fortunes of the nation itself. Dan shows how the story of each house tells the social and economic history of Britain, each built on an economic crest or crash and uniquely expressive of its creator’s aims, strengths and frailties; the crystallisation of a ruling class at a moment in time