Wrest Park is a country estate located in Silsoe, Bedfordshire, England. It comprises Wrest Park, a Grade I listed country house, and Wrest Park Gardens, also Grade I listed, formal gardens surrounding the mansion. History Thomas Carew (1595–1640) wrote his country house poem "To My Friend G.N. from Wrest" in 1639 that described the old house which was demolished between 1834 and 1840. The present house was built in 1834–39, to designs by its owner Thomas de Grey, 2nd Earl de Grey (1781–1859), an amateur architect and the first president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who was inspired by buildings he had seen on trips to Paris. He based his house on designs published in French architectural books such as Jacques-François Blondel's Architecture Française (1752). The works were superintended as clerk of works on site by James Clephan, who had been clerk of the works at the Liddell seat, Ravensworth Castle in County Durham, and had recently served as professional amanuensis and builder for Lord Barrington. Although Nikolaus Pevsner previously stated that Clephan was a French architect who designed the present house instead of De Grey the amateur architect, as Charles Read has shown in his biography of De Grey, Clephan (born Clapham) in fact only produced drawings of the service infrastructure, such as plumbing and drainage. The decorative layout and features of the house were produced by De Grey's own hand. Wrest has some of the earliest Rococo Revival interiors in England. Reception rooms in the house are open to the public. Nan Ino Cooper ran Wrest Park as a military hospital during World War I, though a fire in September 1916 halted this usage of the house. Following the death of her brother Auberon Herbert, 9th Baron Lucas, she inherited his title and the house and sold it in 1918. It was sold after the War to Mr JG Murray, who was associated with cricket in Bedfordshire. During his 18-year tenure, much of the garden statuary was sold, while extensive felling stripped park and garden of many of their oldest trees. He sold it to Sun Alliance Insurance in 1939, and after the Second World War it became a centre for modern agricultural engineering research. English Heritage took over the house and gardens in 2006 and began a 20-year restoration project to return the gardens to their pre-1917 state. Wrest Park Gardens Wrest Park has an