Marcus Binney has spent 40 years looking for beautiful and little known country houses to write about in Country Life and The Times. Most books on country houses are based on properties regularly open to the public but this book is different, it is full of dream houses which have remained quietly in family ownership for centuries and which only surface to public gaze when they come on the market. Marcus has had the great good fortune to explore and photograph them from attic to basement and to subsequently write about their charms - eccentric owners, setting, gardens and grounds, architecture, interiors and domestic comforts. The result is a privileged glimpse of some of the most beautiful and largely unknown houses in the British Isles, in Ireland and the Channel Islands and a tour through the domestic history of these islands.