Luke and Julie Montagu, aka Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, are not your average Lord and Lady of the manor.
He’s a liberal aristocrat, she’s an American yoga teacher. They keep ducks for pets rather than labradors, furnish their wardrobes with charity shop finds rather than designer labels and have embraced the digital age by running a hugely successful YouTube channel about their beautiful 16th-century stately home, Mapperton House in Dorset.
“We can turn it on when we need to,” says the future 12th Earl of Sandwich of his titled status. “But we don’t want to most of the time.”
The couple and their four children – Emma, 25, and Jack, 23, from Julie’s first marriage, and their sons William, 19, and Nestor, 17 – have made Mapperton their home, living in private quarters in the back part of the house since 2016, when they took over responsibility for the estate from Luke’s parents.
‘These wonderful places aren’t the domain of a select few. This is a shared heritage with shared stories’
Luke
They were soon confronted with the challenge facing all owners of stately homes, which is, he says: “How to keep the roof in the face of enormous, rising costs.”
Nestled in a verdant
