Melville House lies to the southside of Monimail in Fife. It was built in 1697 by the architect James Smith (c.1645 - 1731) for George Melville, 1st Earl of Melville, incorporating the 14th Century Monimail Tower. The Melville State Bed was given to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1949 where it is described as "the most spectacular single exhibit in the Victoria and Albert Museum's British Galleries". During the 20th Century the house was used to billet Polish soldiers during World War II before being bought by Dalhousie Preparatory School, when they moved premises to Melville House, from Dalhousie Castle, Bonnyrigg. It remained a private preparatory school for a large number of years, before Dalhousie finally closed, and and later became a reform school for Young Offenders.
It is the most expensive repossessed property in Britain.
Famous quotes containing the words melville and/or house:
“Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Go out of the house to see the moon, and ‘t is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: ‘t is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)