The Mamhead estate is recorded in the
Domesday Book of 1086 as belonging to
Ralph de Pomeroy. It was owned by the Carew and Ball families, of which latter Thomas Ball (1671–1749) was a merchant who planted many exotic trees. His head gardener Thomas Lucombe became a prominent nurseryman at Exeter. Subsequently, the estate was owned by the
Earls of Lisburne until it was bought by Robert Newman in 1823. In the 1770s,
Capability Brown had undertaken landscaping of the grounds. Newman was the senior partner in Newman & Co., a trading company based in Exeter that had established a small shipping fleet to support its trade with
Portugal and
Newfoundland. The original mansion house of the Balls had been demolished in the late 18th century and shortly after purchasing the estate, Newman commissioned
Charles Fowler to design a new house. Fowler's
Italianate plans did not find favour and Fowler had got no further than constructing the
footings before he was replaced by Anthony Salvin. At 26, Salvin had his first important commission in Mamhead, and it made his reputation. His designs for the house were in the
Tudor Revival style, then a relatively new architectural approach, and incorporated the initials of Newman and his new wife, together with the Newman family
motto in the decorative skyline above the main entrance. The Newman family retained ownership of the estate until the 1950s when Sir Ralph Newman, Robert Newman's great-grandson, sold it to an evangelical society. It subsequently housed a school, Dawlish College, in the 1960s, and was the regional headquarters of the
Forestry Commission in the 1990s. In the early 21st century the house, again privately owned, operated as an events and wedding venue, hosting the second marriage of
Peter Andre in 2015. The business subsequently went into liquidation, and its owner was disqualified from acting as a company director in 2019. In 2020 the house, with an estate of approximately 164 acres, was put up for sale at a guide price of £10,000,000. ==Architecture and description==