How much did it cost to build a stately home in the 1700s?

by TheStat

So approximately how much in today's currency would it take to build a moderately sized stately home like this one

joustswindmills

I can’t answer directly your question for a variety of reasons. I will, I hope, give you some idea as to the costs. The most obvious reason I can’t answer directly is I don’t know about inflation from then till today. If you can find it somewhere, I suppose it would be easier to do the math. A second reason is ‘what is moderately sized’. My moderate is probably different from your moderate. There was a house built that had as its entire first floor a stables so that one wouldn't be bothered to go outside in inclement weather. I would suggest that is not a moderate sized stately home. I would imagine that it also depends on when you built your house, where you built it, with what materials you built it, and oddly, by whom it was built.

I was remiss in thinking that Bryson gave lots of figures. He gave a lot of stories from mid 1500s to early 1900s in both America and England, some of which included figures.

Bryson references Castle Howard in Yorkshire often. There is no solid monetary figure but can one call this a modest estate? According to Vanbrugh biographer Kerry Downes it was ““built of a scale previously the prerogative of royalty”. It has or had at one point 13 formal rooms with only a few bedrooms; there wasn’t a west wing of the house for a while; there are different styles of pillars on opposite sides of the house; doric and Corinthian. The architect was someone who had no previous experience of architecture. While this doesn’t get you to your answer, it is enough to say that the cost was well within the means of the 3rd Earl of Carlisle. By 1725 Carlisle estimated that he had spent over £78,000 and that was without the west wing.

Then there was Blenheim, which was built for John Churchill (yes, that Churchill family), the 1st Duke of Marlborough, to celebrate his victory of the French in the battle of Blenheim. It was built by the state. On their website, it states that Marlborough was given “the Park, Woodstock Manor, and £240,000 to build the Palace as a gift from Queen Anne and a grateful nation”. It was desgined by the same guy as Castle Howard between 1705 and 1722. Between 1764 and 1774 the Parkland of the estate was transformed as well by some very innovative thinking by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, some things included the ha-ha garden which was some sleight of hand trick designed to hide ‘unsightly’ landscape scars. 300 some rooms over seven acres with a frontage of 865 feet. Bryson gives a different figures than the website, saying that it was supposed to cost £40,000 but ultimately costing £300,000. It also brought in £6,000 /yr, which was “a huge sum but not enough to pay for a house that size”.

Another estate that might not be modest is Fonthill Abbey with a very strange backstory and worth looking up. This one designed by James Wyatt for William Beckford, a sugarcane tycoon. The final cost is unknown, presumably because of collapsing towers and round the clock workers. But according to Bryson “an informed observer stated that [in 1801] Beckford had already spent £242,000.” Part of this includes 500 workers working around the clock, and the fact that Wyatt would leave to build other projects.

One interesting thing, I think, about the costs of houses was the building material. Brick started to become fashionable in the Georgian era because of its resistance to pollution. One of the problems was that it was difficult to bake a consistent brick. One guy tried 150,000 bricks before giving up. It was only when a German invented a brick baking kiln that one was able to get consistent bricks for buildings. There was one attempt to build a house for George III out of cast iron! Concrete was tried, as well as timeless wood, iron and steel (after your requested timeframe.) The other building material impervious to pollution was Coade stone, which is a type of ceramic basically and it was used between 1760 and 1821 when Eleanor Coade, the businesswoman at the head of the enterprise died. Apparently, coade looks and acts like stone. Some examples according to Bryson are “the large lion on Westminster Bridge; it can be found at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Tower of London, on the tomb of Captain Bligh in the churchyard of St Mary-at-Lambeth.”

The most fascinating aspect of the building material, I think, is that out of the 840 large country houses, which includes Blenheim and Castle Howard, most of them were built with stone that came from surrounding areas because moving it 10-12 miles doubled the cost!
Bryson does talk a lot about Monticello and Mount Vernon but more about how the materials were hard to come across because of the British forcing the colonies to send everything back to England to be made into goods and then resent back. I don’t know what Monticello was built for, but it was sold for $7,000 in the 1820s mostly due to its rundown shape after an initial ask of $70,000 and that was after Jefferson died.