When the Sitwell family is mentioned, most people think of its most famous members: the siblings Edith (1887–1964), Osbert (1892–1969), and Sacheverell (1897–1988), “a delightful but deleterious trio,” in the words of Edmund Gosse, glittering masters of self-advertisement who challenged Bloomsbury as arbiters of taste during the 1920s and ’30s and went on grabbing the aesthetic limelight right up until their triumphant tours of the United States in the 1940s and ’50s, where they went, like Oscar Wilde before them, to preach the gospel of Art and Beauty and to earn a few Yankee dollars in the process. According to Evelyn Waugh, they “radiated an aura of high spirits, elegance, impudence, unpredictability, above all of sheer enjoyment. They declared war on dullness.”

But there were other Sitwells, Desmond Seward reminds the world in his new book Renishaw Hall: The Story of the Sitwells, and it is Seward’s contention that the family’s greatest legacy is neither Edith’s poetry, nor Osbert’s admittedly entertaining autobiography and novels, nor Sachie’s influential, revisionist works of art history, but the family home: Renishaw Hall near Sheffield in Derbyshire, built in 1625–26 by one George Sitwell, the son of a well-off local yeoman who had made a fortune mining iron ore.1It was added to and embellished by George’s descendents, most notably Sir George Sitwell (1860–1943), father of the deleterious trio, and the late Sir Reresby Sitwell, who became Renishaw’s proprietor in 1965 when his uncle Osbert, crippled by Parkinson’s disease, retired