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In many Baroque houses the principal
bedrooms for the family and their more important guests were
on the ground floor, and were arranged in connecting suites known
as 'apartments'. Elaborate protocol governed how far an eighteenth-century
visitor was invited to penetrate along the line of progressively
more private chambers. Upsetting such protocol, we now enter
the most intimate of these rooms, the State Closet. The cupboard
on the inside wall held that necessity of eighteenth-century
life, the chamber pot.
The fireplace straddles the corner
of the room and has a stepped overmantel for the display of Chinese
blue-and-white porcelain, a fashion popularised in Britain by
Queen Mary, in the late seventeenth-century. Many of the smaller
chambers at Beningbrough contain similar overmantels similarly
decorated. The pine panelling would originally have been painted,
but was stripped in the 1920s by the Chesterfields following
the fashion of the day.
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In focus: State Bedchamber Suite
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