A tale of three houses and one family: furniture and decorative arts from Canford Manor, Wimborne House and Ashby St Ledgers Manor

In 1918, the MP for Plymouth, Ivor Churchill Guest (1873-1939), was raised to the title of Viscount Wimborne of Canford Magna — a noble rank between a baron and an earl, named after his estate in the county of Dorset.

He was the eldest son of Ivor Bertie Guest, 1st Baron Wimborne (1835-1914), and the grandson of Sir Josiah John Guest, 1st Baronet Dowlais (1785-1852), a Welsh industrialist who had grown the family’s modest foundry in Merthyr Tydfil into the largest producer of iron in the world.

Over the course of the 20th century, the title of viscount passed down through three generations of male heirs: first Ivor Grosvenor Guest (1903-1967), then Ivor Fox-Strangways Guest (1939-1993), and finally to Ivor Mervyn Vigors Guest (b. 1968), the 4th — and current — Viscount Wimborne.

Thanks to the way the United Kingdom’s peerage system works, he is also the 6th Baronet Guest, the 5th Baron Wimborne and the 4th Baron Ashby St Ledgers.

The current viscount is a passionate ecologist and successful, Grammy-nominated record producer, perhaps best known for his work with Grace Jones and Beyoncé.

Until 9 April 2025, as part of Collections: Property from the Viscount Wimborne and the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, Christie’s in London is offering more than 50 historic lots once belonging to Viscount Wimborne and his family, ranging from portraits to porcelain dinner services, European furniture and silver.

A suite of family diamonds once photographed by Cecil Beaton will appear in Jewels Online: The London Edit, from 21 May to 6 June; and on 1 July, The Exceptional Sale in London will feature a rare French desk. Also on 1 July, Old Masters Part I will include several paintings, such as an equine portrait by George Stubbs, a view of Venice’s Grand Canal by Michele Marieschi and a Madonna by Pasqualino Veneto, all from the Guest family’s major estates.

Canford Manor

Sir John and Lady Charlotte were the first serious collectors in the Guest family. Having turned Dowlais ironworks into an immensely successful business, in 1846 the couple purchased Canford Manor, a sprawling Dorset estate first recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.

After paying the modern equivalent of more than £40 million for the property, the couple hired Sir Charles Barry, whose designs for the new Houses of Parliament had recently begun construction in Westminster, to remodel the house as a Neo-Gothic manor, adding an imposing tower and great hall.

Lady Charlotte was not only a great business mind who spoke several languages — her life is the subject of a book, Lady Charlotte Guest, The Exceptional Life of a Female Industrialist — she was also a particularly voracious acquirer of fine things.

Her diaries reveal a great determination to track down portraits of her relatives, including Peregrine Bertie, 3rd Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven. She also had a passion for ceramics and porcelain. An 1897 photograph of Canford Manor’s Long Gallery shows a Cozzi porcelain dinner service made around 1775, which she probably purchased, proudly displayed all over the wood-panelled interior.

Another photograph, taken in 1888, shows the bedroom of the couple’s son, Ivor Bertie Guest. Every inch of floor, mantel and wall is adorned with exquisite artworks and objects: next to the fire is a fine Regency mahogany and ebony longcase clock made in London by Barwise & Sons around 1820, while hanging nearby is a Grand Tour view of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, pictured from the north, by a follower of Michele Marieschi.

The mansion was also famously home to a number of ancient Assyrian reliefs excavated by Sir Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud in the 1840s. The majority he gave to the British Museum, while a handful were gifted to his cousin and sponsor, Lady Charlotte, in 1849. Some 60 years later, they were sold off, eventually passing to J.D. Rockefeller, who gifted them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1932.

In 1923, Canford Manor was sold and became a school, and what were presumed to be casts of the reliefs decorated the tuck shop. In 1992, however, a visiting Assyriologist managed to identify one panel — through layers of emulsion paint — as a 2,800-year-old, long-lost original. It sold at Christie’s in 1994 for £7.7 million.

Wimborne House

Ivor Bertie Guest expanded his parents’ industrial empire and the family’s property holdings. In 1867, a year before he married Lady Cornelia Spencer-Churchill, the daughter of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, he purchased 22 Arlington Street, overlooking Green Park. One of London’s grandest Palladian townhouses, it was originally built for Henry Pelham, the former prime minister.

In 1880, when Guest was dubbed Baron Wimborne of Canford Magna, the name of the property was altered to reflect his new title, becoming Wimborne House.

Ivor Bertie employed George Trollope & Sons to modernise the original, lavish William Kent and Owen Jones interiors, incorporating fashionable sculpture, Continental furniture and Chinese porcelain in the palatial spaces. Period photographs reveal the calibre of some of his purchases, including a sumptuous Genoese console table that now resides in the V&A museum.

A photograph taken around 1897 of one of the house’s gallery corridors depicts huge vases, elegant chairs, glass display cases, towering plants and a pair of Scagliola columns supporting marble busts. When Sir John Lavery painted Chamber Music at Wimborne House some 40 years later, the columns had been moved to the ballroom and topped with a noble pair of alabaster, marble and gilt-bronze busts of an African king and queen.

The ballroom regularly played host to dazzling society gatherings attended by royalty, politicians and prominent cultural figures. A photograph by Cecil Beaton shows Ivor Bertie’s elegant daughter-in-law, Alice, Viscountess Wimborne, ready for one such soirée, adorned in a diamond-studded tiara, necklace and bracelet.

In fact, the room was so legendary that Ivor Bertie was reportedly approached by the owner of the adjoining Ritz hotel, asking how much it would cost to buy the property. He was said to have asked in return, ‘How much do you want for the Ritz?’ A century later, however, the hotel finally managed to acquire Wimborne House, and it is now used to host special events.

Ashby St Ledgers Manor

In 1903, Ivor Bertie’s son, Ivor Churchill Guest, the 1st Viscount Wimborne, purchased Ashby St Ledgers Manor in Northamptonshire.

The recorded history of the house stretches back a millennium, predating the Norman conquest. In 1605, it was notoriously a rendezvous point for the conspirators of the failed Gunpowder Plot, whose aim was to blow up the House of Lords and kill King James I.

Ivor Churchill set about transforming the awkward medieval manor — with Tudor and Jacobean additions — into a fashionable Edwardian mansion, employing the distinguished architect Sir Edwin Lutyens for several periods between 1904 and 1938 to oversee the works. According to family legend, the viscount was reportedly one of the few clients Lutyens ‘knew how to say “no” to’.

The property’s vaulted ceilings, grand chimneys and magnificent plasterwork were complemented by a sumptuous collection of English furniture, French tapestries and Italian sculptures. Surviving photographs show the music room, card room and two dining rooms set with English stained-oak dining chairs, pieces of Louis XVI ormolu-mounted Sèvres porcelain and a pair of German Wedgwood jasperware-mounted mahogany commodes.

The house was eventually inherited by Ivor Churchill’s son, Ivor Grosvenor, then by his son, Ivor Fox-Strangways, who sold the estate in the 1970s and moved to Paris.

The house then passed through several more owners before sitting empty for a decade — until the current Viscount Wimborne was given a chance to buy back his childhood home. ‘I happened to visit the village and found it was to be sold on again,’ he told Country Life of the serendipitous purchase in 1998.

Under his tenure, it was remodelled once more, this time to incorporate his own collection of Minimalist design, modernist furniture, and art that ranges from Asian calligraphy to contemporary photography — as well as his heirloom pieces.

In 2015, Ashby St Ledgers passed into the possession of the viscount’s cousin. It remains the property of the Guest family today.

A showcase of decorative arts from distinguished private houses and estates, Collections is offered online. Collections: Including the Orange Blossom Collection and Works from ‘Centuries of Taste’ is open for bidding until 8 April; Collections: Property from the Viscount Wimborne and the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire is on view in London and open for bidding until 9 April; and Collections: Entre Orient et Occident au XVIIIe siècle, regard d’un amateur éclairé & Souvenirs des princes Murat is on view in Paris, 12-15 April, and open for bidding until 15 April

Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector, by Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, profiles Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812-1895), also known as Lady Charlotte Guest, née Bertie. It is published by Lund Humphries on 19 September 2025