Charlemont Hall was once the playground of the Regency bucks and their ladies, communal as some of them were: the favoured few, the hangers on who exchanged sycophantic compliments thrown with abandon at the Prince Regent circa 1810, for weekends of fun, frolics, and pseudo-roman disgusting behaviour in the pseudo-roman disgusting mausoleum-like structures that litter the estate grounds concealed as most of them are by strategically planted rhododendron shrubs that over time have conspired to join forces and almost obliterate the once fine gardens; the strange thing is nothing changes, what goes around comes around as they say. Charlemont Hall was to witness an action replay of this aspect of celebrity behaviour albeit two hundred years later.
Successfully surviving the First World War when it absolved itself from earlier sins by bringing injured ordinary working class soldiers hardly fresh from the poppy fields of France into its bosom it continued into the twenties deafened by The Black Bottom and The Charleston played from lunchtime - no-one gets up until noon darling - until dawn the following day. Even the second conflict failed to do any permanent damage to either its fabric or its fortitude once more enveloping the poor unfortunates not lucky enough to be an officer and therefore qualifying them to a billet nerarer the fleshpots of so-called civilisation.
So thus, Charlemont hall survived, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, on occasion by the good grace of a Royal patron until the early years of the twenty first century when it was seen by a lady of vision as a location for a rather up-market and very private hotel. In the words of Lady Charlotte Montgomery - 'I will return Charlemont Hall to its former glory, I will carry out essential repairs and restoration at my own expense, but in return you will grant me a long lease and permission to run it as an exclusive hotel, catering for those members of our ruling classes who need privacy in luxurious accomodation where they can de-stress courtesy of their own personal masseusse, reseach in the company of their own personal researcher, somewhere where they can have time to reflect, become one with nature, somewhere to gain peace of mind, a retreat to charge the batteries for those who have the awesome responsibility of making the big decisions that affect us all...' A knocking shop for the great and the good, she could have said, but thought better of it. And so it came to pass