The series of rooms on the ground floor of the west front were built as lodging rooms for the Elizabethan house.
The Blue Drawing Room
In the eighteenth century the Blue Drawing Room was a breakfast room and it was at this time that the French window was inserted, allowing access to the lawns. The present scheme of decoration dates from the 1830s when a new marble chimneypiece was inserted (probably the work of George Earle Junior (c.1810-35) of Hull), a new ‘umbrella' plasterwork domed ceiling added to the bay and the room completely refurnished.
The Chippendale Room
This room served as a drawing room during the eighteenth century up until c.1780, when William Constable's crippling gout forced him to take up residence on the ground floor and the room became his sitting room. It was comfortably furnished and filled with 53 small paintings from his picture collection. In the nineteenth century the room was decorated with green silk damask and became the Green Drawing Room. The present pale blue decoration dates from the 1970s when the room was renamed to present a display of Chippendale furniture which had recently been repaired, repainted and re-upholstered by Dick Reid of York.
The Chinese Room
Following visits made to Brighton Pavilion in the 1830s, Marianne, Lady Clifford-Constable and her sister Eliza were inspired to create the Chinese Room. The walls were hung with the new Chinese wallpaper, stencilled designs were added to doors and walls, and silvered bells hung from the cornice and doorway. £89.18.0 was paid to Thomas Brooks (1778-1850) for carving the fantastic gilded dragons set to either side of the window bay. Marianne designed the elaborate dragon chair which was carved in 1841 by the talented Thomas Wilkinson-Wallis (1821-1903) whilst he was still serving his apprenticeship with Thomas Ward of Hull.
Following the establishment of the Burton Constable Foundation in 1992, the first conservation project undertaken was the repair of the nineteenth-century Chinese wallpaper. This involved the painstaking removal of the paper from the wall. The paper was washed and then backed with hand-made Chinese lining paper before re-hanging. During the removal of the wallpaper a strip of the eighteenth-century ‘reed and ribbon' wallpaper border was discovered beside the window bay.
The Burton Constable Foundation, a charitable trust set up in 1992 with an endowment from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, runs Burton Constable Hall as a Country House Museum..
Registered Charity No.1010121 Registered Museum No. 604 
