The Stately Homes of England

We only keep them up for Americans to rent...

Some of England's peers have found more creative solutions. They not only inhabit their ancestral piles, but run them as businesses too, dangling their glittery goods like fishing lures to attract much-needed cash. "In the United States, we tend to have a romantic view of owning a great British estate," says Tom Savage, the director of museum affairs at Winterthur, the 175-room Delaware estate of the late chemical heir Henry Francis du Pont, which houses the foremost collection of American furniture and decorative objects. "But often the veil falls when you see inheritors to whom collecting is not a choice but an encumbering obligation: Out of economic necessity, they're doing everything in their power to hold on to what they've got."

...and Noel Coward.