Exploring Castle Howard: The 10,000 Acre Home of Bridgerton | Houses with History

hi I'm Remy renzulo an interior decorator and today we're here at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire Castle heart has been the home of the Howard family for the last 300 years and they've lived in the house continuously since it was first built in 1701. I've been very lucky for the last few years to get to work on decorating various aspects of the house by far the most dramatic and distinguishing architectural feature of Castle Howard is the Great Hall and which is crowned with the first dome I've been put into a domestic building in England and it's really vandro's Triumph in terms of Interiors of the house the Great Hall is an extraordinary space and by far the most architecturally defining element of the house I remember the first time that I came here and walked into the room and was overwhelmed by the beauty of it but also incredibly intimidated by the thought of contributing in any capacity state to this extraordinary house with this incredible architecture everywhere [Music] one of my favorite rooms at Castle hide is the Crimson dining room which is the state dining room so to speak of the house and it forms part of the awful lot of staterooms that are on the Southwest facade of the house I love dining rooms I think that they can have such a warmth to them and I think that they're just wonderful sort of backdrops for great dinners they are also one of my favorite rooms to decorate because you know I love Fabric and pattern and texture and certainly a dining room really allows one to do that something I really love is one really gets a sense of time and history sort of visibly written on the walls and I think nowhere is that more evident than somewhere like the Crimson dining room where you have some this wonderful uh Crimson damask on the walls and because the collection is always changing the pictures are always being moved and re-hung you really get a sense of the visible history of the room in here and you know I I love the fading of the damask in some places and versus where you can still see the original color where for a long time there was a specific painting hanging there and because the collection is always changing and being rotated and re-hung you you really see the sort of the history on the fabric of the walls of this realm there's an amazing picture collection at Castle Howard and some of my favorite pictures in the house are the scenes of Venice that occupy the walls of the dining room and this this is um just an incredible painting by palato at night when this room is lit by by candle and filled with people it's just got a wonderful atmosphere in it and that's something that you know is really important to me when I go to decorate a room it's not just the way that the room looks but the feeling that it conveys now [Music] um we're up in the attics of the house which is an area that I spend a lot of time in it's pretty amazing this used to be a bedroom wing of the house when it was first built and over time has just sort of evolved and may one day be put back into the bedroom Lane but for the moment it houses storage for overflow of the collection it's an area of the house that I spent a lot of time in and is quite important because one I'm working with the family to put rooms together here I often come up to have a look around and see what there is that I might want to use whether there are lots of amazing etchings and mesotints and small paintings that are great for bedrooms or to have a look at furniture it's a pretty great place to get to spend time the furniture selection process is huge for me in terms of decorating and so I just have so much fun spending hours up here you know looking behind looking at all the paintings looking at the furniture and sort of figuring out what things can I use and suppose that's a really amazing part of working on a house like Castle Howard is that I don't really have to go out and find that much Furniture there's so much here already that's sort of waiting for a new lease on life over the last year one of the most exciting projects I've been working on in conjunction with the house is a special collaboration with watts of Westminster the fabric and wallpaper company in a project we've been doing to reproduce some of the textile documents and wallpapers that are in the castle Howard archive this bedroom which by far is my favorite in the house it's called archbishops and it has this extraordinary what we call the goose wallpaper this wallpaper is from the anglo-japanese movement and this was installed in about 1884 by Rosalind the ninth Countess of Carlisle and she and her husband George who was the ninth Earl were extraordinary patrons of the Arts of their time Rosalind embarked on sort of the largest Redeemer creation of the house since its Inception and this was one of the rooms which she worked on and still exists in the form in which she had originally decorated it and this is something that we've worked really closely with Watson over the past year to reproduce and it's been really fun to look at the trials of the wallpaper throughout the development process and compare them to the original and something in particular that we tried to focus on was um capturing a wallpaper in its present form suppose to how it might have looked when it was first installed because obviously having been here for 150 years it's acquired a bit of a patina and in fact I think that's for me what what makes it one of the what makes it quite beautiful and so we wanted the the paper that we're reproducing to have a little bit of a sort of manufactured patina if you will one of the great features of the house are these amazing 19th century pollinate or polish beds they appear throughout the house on a number of different bedrooms this one had quite a famous moment on TV it was um dressed in its present form for the original uh filming of Brighton reviews it and while it's lovely in its present form it was made for the filming and I feel that given the beauty of the wallpaper in this room and the amazing carpet and furniture that it is time for a little bit of an update to the fabric on it and so that's something that we've just had a meeting this week about actually looking at fabric options for this bed and so this will uh be sort of re re-hung and redressed and new trim applied sort of throughout this spring [Music] in the Admiral's bedroom this is a room I'm really excited about and quite proud of that I spent the last couple of months working on one of the really sort of defining features of it is uh is this amazing fabric on the bed and curtains and this is again a document that we've reproduced from the castle Howard archive with watts and as part of a sort of celebration of the collection we decided we wanted to use it in this room it was really exciting to get to work on it because the proportions that are amazing it's such a dramatic bedroom we spend a lot of time thinking about sort of what what form the decoration would take but this was a sort of complete redecoration of the entire space the room has this wonderful paneling and we wanted it to have this early feeling kind of of when the house was first built in the beginning of the 18th century the idea for the color on the walls was um I had said sort of wanted to feel almost like like that blue that you see in a Vermeer painting I was really fortunate to work with Alec Cobb who's an extraordinary decorator and he immediately knew exactly the color or the shade of blue for this room and it just totally transformed it and then um I love Rush Madding so much and Felicity irons who is based on Norfolk is the best woman in the UK that makes it and she came up here and installed this over the course of a week and it just suddenly changed the entire room and I think in conjunction with the fabric and the furniture it completely evokes the feeling that we were hoping for which is at this very early 18th century room and so it's a space that I'm just so proud of the transformation of it [Music] so now we're at the beginning of the East wing of the house which is the family's private wing and not open to the public and this is where a lot of my work initially was focused I just wanted to point out the ceilings which have actually been recently restored and I think they're just extraordinary and this was all done by William Morris in the latter portion of the 19th century when the ninth Earl Encounters of Carlisle took up residence in the house here we're on the East Wing dining room and this is the family's private dining room in the house adjacent to the kitchen and this was quite a fun room to get to work on originally the walls were really really sort of light bright blue that I thought was out of sync with the use of the rim at night and this sort of slightly Dusty terracotta color is something of a signature of mine and really probably my favorite color and it just felt really right for the room to see this lit up with candles at night it has a really really wonderful Warm Glow and it looks great with the paintings in here as well [Music] really one of the most exciting things in the room is um the cabinet behind me I'm quite a fan of porcelain and Ceramics and in particular my absolute favorite are Chelsea Han Sloan Ceramics which we made about 1760 1770 named after Han Sloan who's it was an amazing botanist and sort of the Chelsea physic garden and I had no idea when I came to Castle hard for the first time but they have one of the best collections of Han Sloan Chelsea China that I had ever seen I love it because it's obviously it's so beautiful and the hand-painted Botanicals are wonderful but it doesn't feel too precious or formal and that was sort of the idea with the room as well and then it was really exciting to watch the amazing decorators working on this room who re-gilded everything and just it's the the skill with which they do this extraordinary and it's so fun to watch [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] it's hard to focus on one specific area but for me the time of the Four Winds might be the most iconic extraordinary part of Castle Howard and this was designed by vanra who was largely responsible for the house he was commissioned to design this by the third Earl of Carlisle who'd commissioned him to design the house and Carlisle very much wanted there to be a relationship between the house and the landscape and the building the Temple Four Winds was sort of conceived of as a banqueting pavilion as a Folly essentially and it's not hard to imagine it being sort of amazing for that purpose certainly the floors are extraordinary and it's actually Motif that appears in other places throughout the house this is a type of inlay that's Byzantine Roman called kosmati and this is often distinguished by the use of porphyrie and it's for me probably my favorite sort of type of inlay and there's there's a fireplace in the house the same Motif and as I say it it reappears throughout but what I love about this specific place and its location it's just it has the most extraordinary view from outside and it's a nice way to kind of take in the beauty of the place a lot of moments and being here and working here where I'm still sort of overwhelmed by the beauty of the place and I never really gets all to look at and often I feel at a loss for words in order to really describe it properly but luckily Horace Walpole put it best upon visiting here when he said I have seen gigantic places but never a Sublime one [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: House & Garden

Views: 229,627

Keywords: bridgerton, bridgerton behind the scenes, bridgerton castle tour, castle howard, castle tour, clyvedon castle, country house, design notes, english manor house, historic home, historic house, home decor, home furniture, home tour, house & garden, house & garden design notes, house and garden, house garden, house tour, houses with history, how to interior design, inside bridgerton, interior designer tour, manor house, period design

Id: d-zbg38sgWE

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023