It is a wet, wintry day at Longleat and the Billiard Room is a hive of activity. Emma Thynn, the Marchioness of Bath, has opened the private apartment of her stately home at Longleat to HELLO! and is using this room – formerly the chapel of the house – to switch between designer dresses for a photoshoot that showcases spectacular rooms such as the State Dining Room and The Great Hall, before hauling a Christmas tree up the stone steps to her front door.
At one end of the room is a life-sized oil portrait of her sons, John, Viscount Weymouth, 11, and Lord Henry Thynn, who turns nine on 30 December, dressed in military-style Stella McCartney jackets with shorts and Wellington boots. There is a bar globe that resembles a glitter ball and a bookcase featuring copies of William Gladstone’s Studies on Homer. Outside the window are illuminated replicas of Tower Bridge and a London bus, because the Christmas extravaganza that pops up for the festive period is in full swing.
Stunning surrounds
"Longleat is marvellous and uniquely unusual," Emma says in a break between being photographed on her rooftop to the sound of sea lions’ barks from the ornamental lake below, and another shot that involves her lying on a giant red velvet bow at the foot of a four-poster bed. "Everywhere you look, there’s something weirdly wonderful."
This has been the world inhabited by Emma, 39, since she married Ceawlin Thynn, 8th Marquess of Bath, in 2013. Together, they run perhaps the most exuberant stately home in the world. The 10,000-acre estate is full of superlatives: it houses the oldest drive-through safari park outside Africa, Britain’s longest yew maze and the largest private book collection in the UK.
Just outside the front door are some of the illuminations that make up Longleat’s tenth annual showcase, The Festival of Light. This year, the theme is British Icons, with Wallace and Gromit and friends all rendered in colourful silk stretched over wire frames.
During September’s Icons of the Sky show, which featured hot-air balloons and a Spitfire fly-past, Emma and Ceawlin received a salute from the world-famous RAF Falcons mass parachute team, who dropped out of the sky with red smoke trailing from their boots.
"There’s no such thing as a typical day for me," says Emma, who recently returned from the Fashion Trust Arabia Awards in Doha as part of her role as Hello!’s society editor-at-large. "I always seem to be between a rhino and a red carpet."
She is also the driving force behind Emma’s Kitchen, a food and homeware brand that marries video cooking tutorials with biscuits, jams, china, aprons and oven gloves. She sips from a floral mug from her latest line, the Rose Garden Collection, as she describes the parts of her life that most people don’t see.
Packed schedule
Her boys wake at 7am, so she gets up at six. "I can’t function without exercise," she says, so she’ll spend 20 minutes swimming, then doing Pilates or a barre class. "I take the boys to school and I tend to stay out all day while they’re at school, having business meetings and running errands, always on my phone."
Her phone pings with the latest request for her attention, this time from the estate team. "Look at this! ‘Can you look at some stone samples?’"
This is not the Marchioness that the public sees, walking the red carpet in a blaze of flashbulbs at a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show in Sardinia or on the Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2026, Emma will mark her 40th birthday, a milestone she is unsure how to celebrate. "Kevin Hart’s latest stand-up is called Acting my Age and there’s a line in it where he says it’s a blessing to turn 40, 50, 60. That’s so true. It made me emotional [to think about] just how precious and fragile life is. You have to think about it with a grateful, positive attitude."
"Longleat is marvellous and uniquely unusual. Everywhere you look, there’s something weirdly wonderful."
The family usually confine themselves to the private wing of the house, but for Christmas dinner and special occasions, they troop up to the State Dining Room, with its imposing astronomical clock and Spanish leather wallpaper. For entertaining, they use the Great Hall, a room largely unchanged since a visit by Elizabeth I in 1574.
Emma has put her own stamp on the Robes Corridor upstairs, where her wedding dress is on display, and she has interwoven her own family’s traditions with Ceawlin’s. Her parents are the socialite Suzanna McQuiston, who lives nearby, and the Nigerian-born oil executive Oladipo Jadesimi. Both visited last Christmas.
"My father came with lots of friends last year and we had lunch in the State Dining Room," she says. "John and Henry loved cooking and John was determined to cook as much of the Christmas lunch as possible. We had the traditional food and as an extra, I made jollof rice, just for fun."
Emma says that the guest list for this festive season includes the actor Luke Evans, known for portraying the villainous Gaston in Disney’s live-action version of Beauty and the Beast, the dancer Carlos Acosta and Alan Carr, victor in the BBC’s hit show The Celebrity Traitors. "He said to me: ‘Shall I bring my cloak?’"
For more, visit longleat.co.uk
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