It is the imposing stately home that hosts some of the most shocking and debauched moments of the hit film Saltburn.
Now 700-year-old Drayton House has been hit by a different sort of bad behaviour – hordes of movie fans trespassing on the grounds to take selfies or shoot videos for their social media accounts.
The estate’s real-life aristocratic owner, Charles Stopford Sackville, has expressed regrets to UK media about letting the cameras into his Grade I-listed country pile – and reveals that he’s had to lay on security patrols to keep tabs on the unwanted visitors.
“I never envisaged the amount of interest there would be. It’s quite weird,” he said.
“I don’t take it as flattering. How would you feel if people were taking pictures outside your house? I’d prefer the interest to blow over but I can’t make it blow over.”
Each weekend brings hundreds more sightseers to the estate near the village of Lowick in Northamptonshire.
Many film themselves dancing in front of the house to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder On The Dancefloor in tribute to the movie scene in which Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver frolics naked around the mansion.
Fans have shared directions of how to get to the “real Saltburn house” and how to access a public footpath that runs through the middle of the estate.
One TikTok video detailing the path’s precise location has 400,000 views.
Mr Stopford Sackville, 63, said staff had been patrolling the estate after “more than 50” trespassers strayed off the path.
“Most people are fairly good, but some get a bit inquisitive, let’s say,” he lamented.
He admitted the generous fee he received from the film’s producers had “100 per cent” swayed his decision in allowing his 127-room mansion to be used, adding: “These houses don’t run on water.”
He is also friends with the parents of Saltburn director Emerald Fennell, 38, who said she wanted to film at a property which had never been seen on screen before.
As part of the deal to allow shooting, no member of the production team was allowed to mention the real location in interviews, but fans were quick to sniff it out, particularly after Saltburn was released on Amazon Prime Video in December.
Mr Stopford Sackville – who made his fortune in financial data – inherited the estate from his late father Lionel a decade ago but has resisted any urge to open the estate to the public apart from the occasional open day.
Ms Fennell said she chose Drayton House as “a place as unreal as Saltburn had to feel real” and that such a mansion was a “rich and Gothic place to tell a story”.
Saltburn follows Oxford fresher Oliver as he becomes obsessed with aristocratic fellow student Felix Catton, played by Jacob Elordi, who invites him to spend the summer at his family’s country pile.
The dark comedy drama has both delighted and disgusted viewers for its graphic sex scenes, debauchery and explicit nudity.
“There were bits that I liked and bits that I wouldn’t necessarily have put in myself,” Mr Stopford Sackville said.
“But it’s not my film, it’s Emerald’s film.”