Orgies, S&M holidays and erotic film shoots. The bizarre ways the owners of our grandest houses are surviving.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/...article6848525.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
We have all seen them, their tantalising stone walls hunkering, fortress-like, along country lanes, protecting from view the fiercely territorial gentry who are bred to guard these age-old piles. Most of us occasionally glimpse the rich interiors of these stately homes on a guided tour, but a few adventurous souls can now boast a more intimate view. In order to finance an estimated £260m backlog of leaking roofs and collapsing outbuildings, a few plucky owners of ancient seats have begun to consider the value of opening their doors to the amorous.
Some owners are ready to embrace the challenge. With a passion. One — a titled property developer in his late forties, whose 15-bedroom, gilt-clad mansion spans six floors — faces bills of around £10,000 a month to keep the house ticking over and in the family. In addition to renting it out for TV dramas, advertising campaigns, art exhibitions, A-list parties, music videos and glossy-magazine photoshoots, he offers it to porn directors at about £5,000 a time. One American director explains why he travels to Britain to film.
“We’ve got a Victorian piece coming up soon,” he says, “and you can’t shoot a girl in a corset walking around in a trailer park. You really need to have the grand scale. These houses are filled with sophistication and texture, the smell of leather. It’s very visceral and very sexual at the same time. For me, the juxtaposition between the finesse of the grand setting and the rawness of sex provides a perfect tension.”
The same aristocrat also rents his home to Emma Sayle, the owner of Killing Kittens, a club for what she calls the “sexually elite”. Her guests, lured by the exclusivity of orgying under gilt chandeliers, gibber excitedly about the “ravishingly decadent atmosphere”, the “vast marble fireplaces” and “sexual get-off” of seeing naked bodies slinking around in faded Georgian splendour. “It sounds weird,” says a 29-year-old regular, “but I like to think how many people have had sex in these huge rooms before me — even hundreds of years ago.”
The income from “upmarket orgies” and porn shoots, the owner says, “easily” covers the bills, something of a relief, as “corporates don’t have the same event budgets as before, but porn shoots are on the up, so that has balanced it out”. His unabashed approach to making the space pay for itself has enabled him to finish extensive refurbishment on the warren-like basement and future work on two giant function rooms on the ground floor that are “in need of structural repair”.
There are knock-on benefits for those who let Sayle in. “At our parties, the clientele are elite, high-end, good-looking City-boy types. They might be in advertising or media and need venues to entertain clients,” she claims. “Owners get 250 people coming along, and they are all the sort of clients they would promote their venue to. It’s a promotional thing.”
But this lucrative undercover market can conflict with the genteel reputation needed to host sophisticated weddings and art fairs. “When you live in a small community, word can get around,” says the 30-year-old owner of a Scottish estate who was approached by a porn director last year. “Whether you allow such things to happen in your house depends on any reputation you have that you are trying to maintain and, most importantly, the relationship you have with your cleaning lady.” He adds that the demands of a film shoot mean the possibility of “the postie arriving and finding some strapping fella going ten to the dozen in the kitchen, a situation he’d be unlikely to recover from”.
It is no good if brides-to-be pay through the nose for idyllic country-house nuptials if they know their granny is sitting on a sofa used hours before as a vaulting horse for a couple in the raw. So why tell them? It appears that some stately-home owners are not above subterfuge to keep houses afloat.
The unscrupulous but profitable idea of renting a house to a bride and groom at the same time as secretly renting it to other guests is the credit-crunch brainchild of two UK castle owners, both of whom have asked to remain nameless.
And, thanks to the soundproofing offered by 10ft-deep stone walls, this is entirely possible — providing one of the parties is a few feet under.
It’s not hard to arrange if you happen to own a dungeon and there’s a feisty, recession-defying market offering good money to use it. “One castle contacted us about two years ago,” says Sayle. “They said, ‘We’ve got a large vaulted dungeon and you can use it if you like.’ At the time we were putting together various fantasies, like kidnapping scenarios, and it was obvious — we’ll use it for dungeon breaks.”
These “dungeon breaks”, costing guests a cool £3,000, offer the latest S&M paraphernalia for couples and groups looking for a “fully furnished playground”, with a “professional dungeon mistress” as an added extra. “We live in a safe, materialistic bubble in the city,” says a regular fetish-party-goer. “Experiencing an actual castle dungeon, the dark, the stone, it throws you into a fantasy world. It makes fantasy a reality. Your imagination runs wild, and it becomes an out-of-this-world experience where you’re totally removed from your comfort zone.”
Demand is high. Throughout the year, owners sneak Sayle and her team in a day before the couples arrive to “rig stuff up”. As their main trade is in weddings, the castle owners are, understandably, wary about mentioning gimps in the cellar — so they don’t. Which brings a whole new meaning to upstairs, downstairs: weddings above ground can happily coexist with couples enthusiastically trying out the latest in shackles, stretching racks, whipping posts and appendage clamps below.
There are, however, plenty of reasons not to unleash the public on your home. One castle owner thought he was opening his doors to a sports event, only to stumble on a semi-naked female Ukrainian weightlifting champion. The owner of Halswell House in Somerset was in for an even saucier surprise in July. Grahame Bond, a multimillionaire estate agent who was under the impression that he was renting out his house for posh parties and weddings, returned to his grade-I listed home to find a drive full of Porsches, BMWs and Aston Martins, and over 300 revellers at a party in full swing. And, despite noting the rather bizarre long cloaks and masks, he thought nothing of it, until — at the stroke of midnight — topless dancers appeared, alongside a rather unconvincing “priest”, and, as one party organiser put it, “the spell was broken”. Instantly, masks and cloaks hit the floor, party-goers stripped to leather pants, corsets and suspenders and started “having sex over the banisters and beneath the chandeliers”.
Unknown to the estate’s management, the company Little Sins, which reportedly rented the venue for £9,000, has been selling hugely popular “erotic” parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium for seven years, and is now trying to break into the British sex market. From her holiday in Croatia, the company’s 42-year-old co-owner, Michelle Kreeft, explains how the publicity stir caused by Halswell House has been fantastic for business. Stately-home owners, she says, have even started approaching her. And if the company expands “all over the UK” and “wherever they find a good location” — which includes a fortress on the south coast for their latest event — there is the potential for many more owners to return home to leather-clad “priests” and couples swinging naked from the rafters.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/...article6848525.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
We have all seen them, their tantalising stone walls hunkering, fortress-like, along country lanes, protecting from view the fiercely territorial gentry who are bred to guard these age-old piles. Most of us occasionally glimpse the rich interiors of these stately homes on a guided tour, but a few adventurous souls can now boast a more intimate view. In order to finance an estimated £260m backlog of leaking roofs and collapsing outbuildings, a few plucky owners of ancient seats have begun to consider the value of opening their doors to the amorous.
Some owners are ready to embrace the challenge. With a passion. One — a titled property developer in his late forties, whose 15-bedroom, gilt-clad mansion spans six floors — faces bills of around £10,000 a month to keep the house ticking over and in the family. In addition to renting it out for TV dramas, advertising campaigns, art exhibitions, A-list parties, music videos and glossy-magazine photoshoots, he offers it to porn directors at about £5,000 a time. One American director explains why he travels to Britain to film.
“We’ve got a Victorian piece coming up soon,” he says, “and you can’t shoot a girl in a corset walking around in a trailer park. You really need to have the grand scale. These houses are filled with sophistication and texture, the smell of leather. It’s very visceral and very sexual at the same time. For me, the juxtaposition between the finesse of the grand setting and the rawness of sex provides a perfect tension.”
The same aristocrat also rents his home to Emma Sayle, the owner of Killing Kittens, a club for what she calls the “sexually elite”. Her guests, lured by the exclusivity of orgying under gilt chandeliers, gibber excitedly about the “ravishingly decadent atmosphere”, the “vast marble fireplaces” and “sexual get-off” of seeing naked bodies slinking around in faded Georgian splendour. “It sounds weird,” says a 29-year-old regular, “but I like to think how many people have had sex in these huge rooms before me — even hundreds of years ago.”
The income from “upmarket orgies” and porn shoots, the owner says, “easily” covers the bills, something of a relief, as “corporates don’t have the same event budgets as before, but porn shoots are on the up, so that has balanced it out”. His unabashed approach to making the space pay for itself has enabled him to finish extensive refurbishment on the warren-like basement and future work on two giant function rooms on the ground floor that are “in need of structural repair”.
There are knock-on benefits for those who let Sayle in. “At our parties, the clientele are elite, high-end, good-looking City-boy types. They might be in advertising or media and need venues to entertain clients,” she claims. “Owners get 250 people coming along, and they are all the sort of clients they would promote their venue to. It’s a promotional thing.”
But this lucrative undercover market can conflict with the genteel reputation needed to host sophisticated weddings and art fairs. “When you live in a small community, word can get around,” says the 30-year-old owner of a Scottish estate who was approached by a porn director last year. “Whether you allow such things to happen in your house depends on any reputation you have that you are trying to maintain and, most importantly, the relationship you have with your cleaning lady.” He adds that the demands of a film shoot mean the possibility of “the postie arriving and finding some strapping fella going ten to the dozen in the kitchen, a situation he’d be unlikely to recover from”.
It is no good if brides-to-be pay through the nose for idyllic country-house nuptials if they know their granny is sitting on a sofa used hours before as a vaulting horse for a couple in the raw. So why tell them? It appears that some stately-home owners are not above subterfuge to keep houses afloat.
The unscrupulous but profitable idea of renting a house to a bride and groom at the same time as secretly renting it to other guests is the credit-crunch brainchild of two UK castle owners, both of whom have asked to remain nameless.
And, thanks to the soundproofing offered by 10ft-deep stone walls, this is entirely possible — providing one of the parties is a few feet under.
It’s not hard to arrange if you happen to own a dungeon and there’s a feisty, recession-defying market offering good money to use it. “One castle contacted us about two years ago,” says Sayle. “They said, ‘We’ve got a large vaulted dungeon and you can use it if you like.’ At the time we were putting together various fantasies, like kidnapping scenarios, and it was obvious — we’ll use it for dungeon breaks.”
These “dungeon breaks”, costing guests a cool £3,000, offer the latest S&M paraphernalia for couples and groups looking for a “fully furnished playground”, with a “professional dungeon mistress” as an added extra. “We live in a safe, materialistic bubble in the city,” says a regular fetish-party-goer. “Experiencing an actual castle dungeon, the dark, the stone, it throws you into a fantasy world. It makes fantasy a reality. Your imagination runs wild, and it becomes an out-of-this-world experience where you’re totally removed from your comfort zone.”
Demand is high. Throughout the year, owners sneak Sayle and her team in a day before the couples arrive to “rig stuff up”. As their main trade is in weddings, the castle owners are, understandably, wary about mentioning gimps in the cellar — so they don’t. Which brings a whole new meaning to upstairs, downstairs: weddings above ground can happily coexist with couples enthusiastically trying out the latest in shackles, stretching racks, whipping posts and appendage clamps below.
There are, however, plenty of reasons not to unleash the public on your home. One castle owner thought he was opening his doors to a sports event, only to stumble on a semi-naked female Ukrainian weightlifting champion. The owner of Halswell House in Somerset was in for an even saucier surprise in July. Grahame Bond, a multimillionaire estate agent who was under the impression that he was renting out his house for posh parties and weddings, returned to his grade-I listed home to find a drive full of Porsches, BMWs and Aston Martins, and over 300 revellers at a party in full swing. And, despite noting the rather bizarre long cloaks and masks, he thought nothing of it, until — at the stroke of midnight — topless dancers appeared, alongside a rather unconvincing “priest”, and, as one party organiser put it, “the spell was broken”. Instantly, masks and cloaks hit the floor, party-goers stripped to leather pants, corsets and suspenders and started “having sex over the banisters and beneath the chandeliers”.
Unknown to the estate’s management, the company Little Sins, which reportedly rented the venue for £9,000, has been selling hugely popular “erotic” parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium for seven years, and is now trying to break into the British sex market. From her holiday in Croatia, the company’s 42-year-old co-owner, Michelle Kreeft, explains how the publicity stir caused by Halswell House has been fantastic for business. Stately-home owners, she says, have even started approaching her. And if the company expands “all over the UK” and “wherever they find a good location” — which includes a fortress on the south coast for their latest event — there is the potential for many more owners to return home to leather-clad “priests” and couples swinging naked from the rafters.
