About: Sutton Place, Surrey

Sutton Place, 3 miles (4.8 km) north-east of Guildford in Surrey, is a Grade I listed Tudor manor house built c. 1525 by Sir Richard Weston (d. 1541), courtier of Henry VIII. It is of great importance to art history in showing some of the earliest traces of Italianate renaissance design elements in English architecture. In modern times, the estate has had a series of wealthy owners, initially J. Paul Getty, then the world's richest private citizen, who spent the last 17 years of his life there. Its current owner is the sanctioned Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov. A definitive history of the house and manor, first published in 1893, was written by Frederic Harrison (d. 1923), jurist and historian, whose father had acquired the lease in 1874.