How to futureproof your castle

Looks can be deceptive. From the outside, Herefordshire’s Eastnor Castle, designed by architect Robert Smirke in a Norman revival style, is imposing – brutal even – all 4,000 tonnes of stone and turrets. Yet on the inside is a mind-boggling mélange of gothic, Italian renaissance and regency baronial styles. Between the handpainted coffered ceilings, the Pugin scheme in the Gothic Drawing Room, multi-panel tapestries and marquetry, every surface is dense with decoration. 

Built for the 2nd Baron (Lord) Somers between 1810 and 1824, the house bears the imprint of successive generations and has seen both glory days and dormant decay. Today, Imogen Hervey-Bathurst, daughter of owner James Hervey-Bathurst, is masterminding the castle’s next chapter – and making its sensorial overload a calling card. She grew up at Eastnor, and in 2023 became director of what is now a visitor attraction, wedding venue and film location (the castle featured in season one of Succession as a location for Shiv and Tom’s wedding), having formerly worked as director of investment research at Stanhope Capital. 

One bold new venture is the creation of wallpapers, tableaux scéniques and textiles with specialist maker Watts 1874, the soft furnishings and interior decoration business set up by architects George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner in partnership with George Gilbert Scott junior. “Eastnor is highly immersive, it is about the design and the experience, and I felt part of the retelling could be through creative collaborations,” explains Imogen, now in her late 30s and one of three sisters (Isabella and Nancy), with two half-sisters (Stella and Minna) as well. 

Watts 1874, which has long adorned grand schemes including Ham House in Surrey, Powis Castle in Wales and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, has proved the ideal partner. “It is a big undertaking. People normally associate collaborations as reproductions, but at Eastnor we don’t have samples or an archive so the patterns and details are taken directly from the rooms,” says Imogen of the meticulous process involving geometric calibration cameras and digital mapping. The technology allows 3D features – such as the coffered ceiling in the Dining Room – to be turned into trompe-l’oeil 2D wallpapers, 17th-century mythological seascape tapestries in the Long Library (originally from a palazzo in Mantua) into scenic murals, and a Trastámara painted leather screen in the Great Hall to be translated into papers and fabrics. 

Launching at the Déco Off design festival in Paris in January, the Watts 1874 x Eastnor Castle Collection, which comprises digital as well as hand-blocked papers and fabrics, will be primed for private residences, hotels, restaurants and clubs – plus anyone clamouring for unabashed opulence. “We don’t do little flowers – we are all about scale, historically designing for huge properties and churches – and, my God, does Eastnor have scale!” says Marie-Séverine de Caraman Chimay, managing director of Watts 1874 and a fifth-generation Scott. Her grandmother resurrected the firm in the postwar years when the decoration industry was still on its knees.  

The threads between Eastnor and Watts 1874 (which previously had two arms to the business – ecclesiastical/ceremonial and interior decor) twist back through time and personalities. The firm’s creative director Fiona Flint worked with Imogen’s mother, Sarah Hervey-Bathurst, on a series of bespoke wallcoverings in the 1990s. In the research, Flint identified further original Watts decor at the castle.

Imogen herself became aware of the brand at a dinner party sitting next to Robert Hoare, CEO of the ecclesiastical business, Watts & Co. She later visited the atelier in Westminster. “It was an amazing old building full of young people from Central Saint Martins. There were pieces for the Vatican and coronation robes that were all handmade. We talked about the architect Pugin, who worked on the castle, and I felt an instinctive connection,” says Imogen who then met Robert’s sister, Marie-Séverine, at the Chelsea Harbour showroom for textiles and design where she recognised some of the patterns at Eastnor.

Imogen takes me on a tour of the castle’s grand rooms; she is not hidebound by tradition or the weight of history. Her own childhood was not “grand” or princess-like. “We lived in a flat on the other side of the castle with its own entrance so in that way it was not dissimilar to living in a London apartment,” she says. “The grand rooms had fallen into disrepair after a long period lying dormant, land had been sold off and loads of things put away. My grandparents lived like church mice, with buckets and drips and wartime blackout curtains. They simply did not have the means to restore it.”

The romanticism of Eastnor stems from the lives and passions of Imogen’s ancestor the 3rd Earl Somers and his Anglo-Indian wife, Virginia. They lived a proto-bohemian life in a circle that included William Thackeray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf and artist George Frederic Watts, and also travelled extensively, picking up art and antiques along the way. “He was a big collector, random in his taste and must have burnt through a fortune,” smiles Imogen. But the earl’s indulgences may prove gold. The artefacts and furnishings including 17th-century Venetian furniture, renaissance portraiture and tapestries provide Watts’s creative director, Fiona Flint, with a seemingly infinite treasure trove of ideas. 

“There is pattern everywhere, notably in the Pugin scheme in the Gothic Drawing Room but also in embellished textures in wood, stone, wall and lacquer. For me, it is instantly inspirational – a feast,” says Flint, who is reimagining elements for contemporary taste including a scenic wallpaper featuring a beautiful horse digitally “extracted” from a tapestry in the Staircase Hall. Border patterns, dappled with repair threads and intricate marquetry work, have also caught her eye. 

The second significant wave of restoration started in the 1990s when Imogen’s parents set about bolstering the castle’s reputation to boost the private-hire business and visitor attendance. “My father inherited the house and, with my mother, took a big risk to resurrect and rediscover it. But it was her introduction to Bernard Nevill that got things underway. He was an interesting character: a professor of textile design [at the Central School of Art & Design, the Royal College of Art and St Martin’s School of Art] tutoring designers including Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes while designing for Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Balmain. Essentially, he was a complete contrarian and he loved unlovable things! The scenes in Uncle Monty’s London house in Withnail and I were filmed at his house,” says Imogen. 

Given free rein, Nevill and Imogen’s mother would head to country sales and Lots Road Auctions, buying tapestries and commissioning giant mirrors to transform and enlarge the once spartan Staircase Hall with layered rugs, Venetian dragon benches and a dragon chandelier from the Corsini Palace. “They wanted every room to feel lived in and really used,” Imogen explains of the overhaul, with new papers and fabrics commissioned (Flint worked on the project) and artworks and furniture (many older than the castle itself) rearranged and pulled out of storage. The opulent Dining Room with its gilded ceiling was enlivened with blue curtains and upholstery, the Little Library with a Watts strapwork linen wall covering that is also being reprised.

Imogen, as the next-generation châtelaine, is determined to breathe new life into Eastnor. The decorative partnership is one tranche of a rebrand that will also see a dragon replacing a deer in the heraldic logo and a series of cultural salons and events being staged at the castle. Her father, James, meanwhile, continues to run the privately owned castle and estate with operations in tourism, entertainment, hospitality and real estate as well as forestry and farming. 

There is also a steady income from Land Rover that runs off-road driving experiences on the Estate. Indeed, you can order a new Defender in the colourway Eastnor Green. Revenue from events and location hire is less predictable, explains Imogen. In the preservation and future proofing of castles, a bold imagination is required. With the Watts 1874-Eastnor offering, one might find oneself dining out on the other side of the world pleasantly discombobulated by a large swath of the castle’s decorative history. 

eastnorcastle.com, watts1874.co.uk