Pack o' Cards

The Pack o' Cards is a historic house built about 1690 in Combe Martin in North Devon. Today it is a public house and hotel. It is listed Grade II* on the National Heritage List for England. Located on the long High Street in Combe Martin, the building was constructed in about 1690 by local squire George Ley, who, it is said, celebrated his good luck at card games when, after winning a large sum of money, he built a house to represent a house of cards on a plot of land measuring 52 × 53 feet, representing the cards in a pack plus the joker. It has four floors representing the four suits, with 13 doors and fireplaces on each floor equaling the number of cards in each suit, and fifty-two stairs. Before the imposition of the window tax, the panes in all the windows added up to the total value of a pack of cards. Eventually the house passed out of the hands of the Ley family, but it is not certain when exactly the building became an inn. Records show that it was serving that function early in the 19th century, when in 1822 it was called the King's Arms Inn and a Jane Huxtable was the landlady. It was offered for sale in 1831 by the same name. The hotel is said to have been visited by the author Marie Corelli, who supposedly wrote part of her novel The Mighty Atom (1896) in the "Corelli Room" on the third floor, at a desk still preserved in her room. The inn was renamed the Pack o'

Hotel data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).