Wollaton Hall is a country house in Wollaton Park or Nottingham, England. It was built between 1580 and 1588. It was built for Sir Francis Willoughby. It it believed to be designed by Robert Smythson. He was also the architect of the Harkwick Hall.
The floor plan is said to have come from Serlio's drawing from book 3 of his five books of architect.The building consists of a high central hall, surrounded by four towers. A fire caused damage to Smythson's interior decoration of some of the ground floor rooms, but little structural damage occurred. Remodeling was carried out by Wyattville in 1801, and continued intermittently until the 1830s.
The gallery of the main hall contains Nottinghamshire's oldest pipe organ thought to date from the end of the seventeenth century. It is still blown by hand. Paintings on the ceilings and one wall are attributed to Antonio Verrio. Directly over the main hall is a prospect room from which there are extensive views of the Park. Beneath the hall are many cellars and passages, and a well and associated reservoir tank, in which some accounts report that an admiral of the Willoughby family took a daily bath.
In 1881, the house was still owned by the head of the Willoughby family, Digby Willoughby, but by then it was "too near the smoke and busy activity of a large manufacturing town. Now only removed from the borough by a narrow slip of country so that the previous head of the family had begun to let the house to tenants and in 1881 it was vacant. In 2007 some scenes from Batman the Dark Knight Rises were filmed outside of this building.
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