Mentmore Towers is a large mansion in the village of Mentmore, Buckinghamshire, England. It takes its name both from the village in which it stands, and the fact that the front of the house (and in fact the landscape of the surrounding area) is dominated by two tall Gothic towers, highly decorated in the Victorian style.
The house was commissioned in 1851 by the Earl of Rosebery who needed a house close to London yet still in the countryside. He purchased a large expanse of common park land from the Crown, the main portion of which lay in the parish of Mentmore and had the plans laid out for his house. He didn't, however, stay there for very long.
In the late Nineteenth century the house was purchased by the Rothschild family who were attracted by its close proximity to their other houses in Tring, Halton, Ascott and Aston Clinton. They vastly remodelled the internal substructure of the house to their own fancy, though left much of the exterior as it was originally designed. The modern design of much of the house is the same as it was under the ownership of the Rothschilds.
In the mid Twentieth century the family found that they were spending less and less time at the house, and so sold it in 1960 to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement in the United Kingdom. The Beatles were among the many distinguished guests who were regular visitors to the house at this time. It was also through the Maharishi that Mentmore became the British national headquarters of the Natural Law Party in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1997 Mentmore Towers was sold in auction for £180 million to a private company who wanted to turn the house into a hotel. However all planning applications by the company to alter the building for this purpose have been turned down, because it would mean altering the main structure of the house, which is a grade 1 listed building.
