The Grey Room was formerly a dressing room for the Darnley Room and part of Sir Arthur Ingram's 17th century building scheme. Behind the wallpaper, reprinted from one hung here probably in 1894, are the remains of 17th-century plasterwork. A few feet beneath the floor there is the original Jacobean ceiling of the room below, one of the only two of this date still left in the house. The staircase installed by James Wyatt in the 1770s not only reduced this room in size (and at least five others) but also failed to link this level with the second storey of the Tudor west wing. The unsatisfactory wooden steps and the break-through (cut in what was an outside wall of the early Tudor house) were made between 1904 and 1922.

Sir John Ramsden's Dressing Room

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