Exploring Castle Howard: an iconic 18th-century stately home
Released on 05/19/2023
[birds chirping]
[upbeat music]
Hi, I'm Remy Renzullo,
an interior decorator, and today we're here
at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire.
Castle Howard 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,
which is crowned with the first dome
put into a domestic building in England.
And it's really 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 to this extraordinary house
with this incredible architecture everywhere.
One of my favorite rooms
at Castle Howard is the Crimson Dining Room
which is the state dining room, so to speak, of the house.
And it forms part of the of state rooms
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're also one of my favorite rooms to decorate
because 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 Crimson Damask
on the walls.
And because the collection is always changing,
the pictures are always being moved and rehung,
you really get a sense
of the visible history of the room in here.
And 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 collections always changing
and being rotated and rehung,
you really see the sort of the history
on the fabric of the walls of this room.
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 is just an incredible painting by Bellotto.
at night when this room is lit by candle
and filled with people,
it's just got a wonderful atmosphere in it.
And that's something that 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.
[upbeat music]
Now we're up in the annex 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 a bedroom wing,
but for the moment it houses storage
for overflow of the collection.
It's an area of the house that I spend a lot of time in
and is quite important because when 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 mezzotint 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,
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.
[upbeat music]
Over the last year, one of the most exciting projects
that 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,
is 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 redecorating
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 Watts on over the past year to reproduce.
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 capturing the wallpaper
in its present form as opposed 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 makes it quite beautiful.
And so we wanted 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, or Polish beds.
They appear throughout the house
in a number of different bedrooms.
This one had quite a famous moment on TV.
It was dressed in its present form
for the original filming of Brides Have Revisited.
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 be sort of rehung and redressed
and new trim applied sort of throughout this spring.
[upbeat 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 this amazing fabric on the bed and curtains.
And this is again, a document that we 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 of are amazing.
It's such a dramatic bedroom.
We spent 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,
I had said sort of wanted it to feel
almost like that blue that you see in a Vermeer painting.
I was really fortunate to work with Alec Cobbe
who's an extraordinary decorator
and he immediately knew exactly the color,
the shade of blue for this room
and it just totally transformed it.
And then I love rush matting so much,
and Felicity Irons who is based in 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 of this very early 18th century room.
And so it's a space that I'm just so proud
of the transformation of it.
[upbeat 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 are just extraordinary.
And this was all done by William Morris
in the latter a portion of the 19th century
when the ninth Earl and Countess of Carlisle
took up residence in the house.
Here we are in 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 room 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 lid up with candles at night,
it has a really, really wonderful warm glow
and it looks great with the paintings in here as well.
But really one of the most exciting things
in the room is the cabinet behind me.
I'm quite a fan of porcelain and ceramics
and in particular my absolute favorite
are Chelsea Hans Sloane Ceramics,
which were made about 1760, 1770,
named after Hans Sloane who was an amazing botanist
and started the Chelsea Physic Garden.
And I had no idea when I came to Castle Howard
for the first time that they have
one of the best collections of Hans Sloane
Chelsea China that I'd ever seen.
I love it because 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 regilded everything
and just, the skill with which they do it
is extraordinary and it's so fun to watch.
[upbeat music]
In a place of sort of incomparable beauty,
it's hard to focus on one specific area, but for me,
The Temple Of The Four Winds might be the most iconic,
extraordinary part of Castle Howard.
This was designed by Vanbrugh
who was largely responsible for the house.
He was commissioned to design this
by the Third Earl of Carlisle
who 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 of the Four Winds were 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,
and it's often distinguished by the use of.
And it's for me,
probably my favorite sort of type of inlay.
And there's a fireplace in the house
the same motif as I say, it reappears throughout.
But what I love about this specific place
and its location is 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.
There are a lot of moments being here
and working here where I'm still sort of overwhelmed
by the beauty of the place
and it 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.
[birds chirping]
[gentle music]
Starring: Remy Renzullo
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