Country homes flip to attic gross sales to pay tax payments and restore the roof | USAEMALL.com

The writer is a historian and public speaker

Holkham Hall, 130 miles north-east of London, is the 18th-century home to the earls of Leicester. The first earl populated his handsome, four-winged mansion with ancient Roman statues and canvasses by Canaletto, Rubens and Van Dyck. Subsequent generations have garnished this opulence.

But in February it was time for a clearout. Tom and Polly, the present earl and countess, offloaded 400 of Holkham’s lesser treasures: “We have items there that haven’t been used for one, two, three generations — 100 years — and really it’s time to say goodbye,” says Tom Leicester. “It’s quite cathartic.”

Punters paying £20 for a catalogue wandered through Holkham, inspecting a selection that one dealer told me was, “frankly, a bit thin”. But importantly, it had variety: Roman marble fragments, 18th- and 19th-century busts, Victorian china, clocks, “blending high-value pieces with more accessible items that capture the spirit of a classic attic sale”, according to the brochure.

Driven over the past 50 years by the great auction houses, and peaking around the turn of the century, attic sales were warmly welcomed by owners of money-pit historic homes who suddenly found themselves with proceeds that enabled them to buy, say, a piece of contemporary art to add to the ancestral haul — or, at least, to turn up the heating. Held at Castle Howard, Eaton Hall, Raby Castle, Syon House and Woburn Abbey, they became a way of offloading “non-core” assets to buyers excited at securing chattels with a rare provenance at an affordable rate.

The first such sale came about when Britain’s Labour government in 1974 made a spectacular misjudgment. The seventh earl of Rosebery inherited Mentmore, a Victorian mansion built by the Rothschilds and crammed with priceless chattels, and offered it to the nation for £2mn (£18.6mn today), in lieu of 85 per cent estate duty.

Labour forwent the chance to gain a stunning and intact museum via a tax credit, and three years later Lord Rosebery instructed Sotheby’s to auction everything within the house. The Mentmore sale garnered frenzied publicity and made £6mn.

Sotheby’s produced four Mentmore catalogues — Paintings, Furniture, Porcelain and Works of Art — before sneaking in a fifth, General Contents of the House, as something of a tidying-up afterthought. But prices achieved for these odds and ends were astonishingly high.

James Miller, for 25 years in charge of Sotheby’s attic sales, says: “This didn’t go unnoticed by those with historic houses who had lots of bog-standard stuff knocking about.” Indeed, when, in 1991, Miller was asked by the owners of Castle Howard to select one of their pictures for disposal, he recommended an attic sale instead.

It was all cleverly curated. Castle Howard had achieved fame as the setting for TV series Brideshead Revisited, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel. Aloysius, a lead character’s teddy bear, became the motif of the sale, and the recent appetite for aristocratic Englishness — identified and commercialised by Ralph Lauren — was deployed by Sotheby’s marketing department.

The behind-the-scenes reality of the Castle Howard attic sale was rather less refined; some lots were hoicked out of their castle cubbyholes at the last minute. Miller remembers how “the ceramics came out last, were shoved into an industrial washing machine, then passed down a line of my assistants, some wielding a hairdryer, others a glue gun”, before being presented for sale.

The key to successful sales was found to be keeping estimates reasonable. Rather than telling people they were expected to pay £1,000 for a broken chair, often inexperienced buyers were lured into a stately setting, where they were soon fighting for a piece of history. Prices flew.

Success meant attic sales spread abroad, especially to Germany. Owners often could not afford to live in huge schlosses, crammed with the contents salvaged from former family mansions taken over by communist regimes in eastern Europe. When the prince of Thurn und Taxis died in 1990, after decades of hedonism, his widow, Gloria, tackled some of his $500mn debts with a glorified attic sale, organised by Sotheby’s, of the property in Regensberg, Bavaria.

The Holkham auction used all the proven attic sale tactics with skill, placing the objects in their historical context and welcoming the public to see lots in situ. But Holkham is a rare successful reprise of old-fashioned auctioneering: the sale was conducted not by Christie’s or Sotheby’s but by a local house, deploying a catalogue that lacked the gloss of the great attic sales of the past. It is hard to compete with cheaper online auctions, whose chattels no longer need to be transported to a saleroom or shown in costly marquees.

Britain has also moved on from the Brideshead days, when ancestral mansions were viewed as bastions of a distant but still relevant past. Now, many of the great historic houses have little to sell: their attics have long been cleared out.