Hello, I'm Dominique Shembry,
I'm the Collections and House Officer here at The Vyne.
This is The Vyne - welcome.
Unfortunately we can't open the house at the moment
but we've invited our camera crew in to do an exclusive behind-the-scenes 360 degree filming
of some really lovely areas for you to enjoy.
Built sometime around the 1520s by William, Lord Sandys, who was Lord Chamberlain for Henry VIII.
Intended as a great Tudor palace to welcome the king.
What you can see today is a lot less than it would have been when it was first built in the 1520s.
It would have been about the same size as the base court at Hampton Court
and would have stretched down right into the middle of the lake that you can see today on the north front.
This is the ante-chapel and this is the area of the house that would have been used
by the servants and the lower members of the household to hear mass.
This is our Tudor chapel
and we've got the beautiful Tudor stools to the left and the right as you come in
We've also got some fabulous 16th century majolica tiles on the floor as well
that you can see around the pews and the altar.
This is a beautiful area that visitors are unfortunately never allowed to see
because it is really, really fragile.
It's our chapel gallery and we really are in the footsteps of history here
because this is where Henry VIII would have sat to hear mass next to William Sandys.
So we've got some beautiful original Tudor paint work here on the left and the right hand walls
and the back and the front are wonderful 18th century copies.
Originally it would have been a much larger chamber
so you've had the royalty and the Lords of the Manor at the front
and the further back you sat, the less important you were in the household.
Right in front of us are the fabulous 16th century stained glass windows
they are on a par with those at King's College Cambridge
so they are really, really top quality and we are so lucky to have them.
We believe they were brought here by the Sandys family to protect them
from the Parliamentarian soldiers in the English Civil War
and a wonderful legend has it that they were packed away in crates
and hidden in the fish ponds at The Vyne
and then taken out by the Chute family when they took over the house.
This is our tomb chamber - it's not actually a tomb,
It's an effigy of Challoner Chute created by his great-grandson John.
What he had intended to do was have his whole family buried in the tomb
but unfortunately he died before that could happen
and he ended up not being buried here either which is really sad.
It's a beautiful, beautiful memorial to basically the whole of the Chute family
from Challoner Chute right down to John Chute.
It takes a lot of work to look after our fabulous houses and gardens
and we've got our gardeners doing a whole lot of weeding at the moment.
Work hasn't stopped while we've been closed.
We've been really trying hard to maintain our good work.
We're heading now into the summer house garden
which is a beautiful garden named for the summer house in the corner
and the flower beds have been designed to replicate the roof of the summer house
so you can just get this beautiful visual example
of the whole symmetry as you come through the garden.
This is our walled garden which is our kitchen garden now
and we've got our lovely, lovely wild meadow as well
that's worked really well over the last couple of years
and has been really good at attracting bees and other wildlife and insects.
We have a really close relationship with a lovely charity called Thrive
who come in and do all of the kitchen garden planting for us.
So while we've been locked down it's been really hard to give the gardens
the attention that they normally would get but our sweet peas are looking absolutely fabulous
they've worked really, really hard to get them looking good.
So thank you very much for joining us
on this little tour of The Vyne and we hope you've enjoyed it.
We really, really couldn't continue to do the work that we do at the moment
without the help of our supporters and members so please continue to do what you do
and we're really looking forward to welcoming you back as soon as we can.