Brideshead Revisited: inside Castle Howard's 145-room modern restoration

Telegraph

23-05-2025

It's a scene as spine-tinglingly Gothic as anything in The Mysteries of Udolpho: a darkened Castle Howard in all its high baroque splendour, looming into view through a ferocious blizzard, fairy-tale turrets silhouetted against a black January night. As in all the best ghost stories, the castle has been all but abandoned; snow has cut off the driveway, and Covid-19 has severed contact with the wider world. The house lies empty for the first time in its 300-year history, ghostly dust sheets shrouding the furniture and two lonely custodians huddling in a forgotten corner.
'I arrived frozen to the marrow, after an odyssey in the Yorkshire snow, to find this sleeping beauty, shut off from the world,' says Remy Renzullo, the interior designer charged with bringing the property back to life.
The willowy Renzullo, who looks quite the romantic hero with his mop of curls and ruffled shirt undone to here, seems the right man to work the magic. Castle Howard is the ancestral home of the Howard family, completed in 1811 as a marriage of baroque and Palladian architecture, but it's also the embodiment of Brideshead, home of the aristocratic Flyte family in the quintessential 1980s TV Brideshead Revisited, as well as appearing in Bridgerton, Death Comes to Pemberley and Victoria. 'I'm responsible for something that's captured the imagination of millions of people around the world,' says Renzullo, who was brought up on America's East Coast and now splits his time between New York, England and Italy.
Today the delicate nerves of Brideshead's teddy bear-clutching Sebastian Flyte would be shredded by the din of the hammering and drilling of Renzullo's lengthy renovation project. The house opened to the public last month after a period of closure during the winter, with restoration work finally unveiled after years. That's not to say it's finished; Renzullo's gradual refurbishment of the 145 or so rooms that make up the castle continues.
'It's not that sort of project. We are taking the time to find out what feels right, what works in the space. This isn't something you can rush, and what we create here will live on after myself,' says 34-year-old Renzullo, who worked in fashion in New York before branching out into design, his first project being the South American home of entrepreneur Lauren Santo Domingo. 'Centuries of history have unfolded within these walls, and some of the greatest creatives in architecture, the decorative arts and design have all left their imprint here,' he says, referring to the breathtaking Great Hall, designed by the 17th-century dramatist John Vanbrugh, complete with dome, gilding and frescoes. 'We're aware that we're creating a legacy.'
It's a collaborative effort, involving a constant dialogue between Renzullo and the castle's current owners, Nicholas and Victoria Howard, the eighth generation of the family to take on the mighty responsibility of one of the grandest homes in the country. Their daughter, Blanche, who recently marked her 30th and her mother's 70th birthdays with a fantastical 'centenary' party at the castle, introduced her parents to Renzullo. She sent him a casual email suggesting he decorate her parents' home, not hinting that this meant, in fact, the once-in-a-lifetime refurbishment of Castle Howard. 'Nick and Vicki have an extraordinary level of interest in the visual arts, and we work very, very closely together,' says Renzullo.
The catalyst for the renovations is an incident that predates Nicholas and Victoria's stewardship by decades: a devastating fire in 1940 that ripped through sections of the castle when it was being used as a girls' school during the Second World War (brave young boarders saved antiquities and works of art, dashing with them to safety before the fire brigades arrived). It has been a gradual process to restore the damaged rooms to the public. Once they were ready, the Howards decided to apply a fresh eye to the rest. 'Our long-term mission is the restoration and conservation of this amazing place,' says Victoria Howard, who married Nicholas in 1992, in a ceremony at Castle Howard (where else?). 'We decided to start with the Tapestry Room as it was the only room of the visitor route to remain gutted by that fire, so its restoration affords a sense of completion.
'Once we'd finished the Tapestry Room, there was a cascade of effects, starting with the decision to do a rehang of the pictures in the Long Gallery,' adds Nicholas. 'We've loved working with Remy to reimagine the house. We didn't want to rush anything.'
In practical terms, this involved a gradual refurbishment of both the private and the public spaces of Castle Howard, exploring the attics for a forgotten rococo bergère, or freshening up a slightly dishevelled Victorian sofa. 'It's not necessarily about bringing in new finds,' Renzullo explains. Instead it's about salvaging a table somewhere and bringing it to life in a different space. 'It's more expensive to restore and recover an old piece, but it makes sense in this context.' By way of illustration, he points to the dainty sofa in a shell-pink damask that we're sitting on. 'This is late Victorian, absolutely wonderful, but was falling apart. We spent six months restoring it by hand, and it's now beautiful and picks up the gold accents in the room.'
We are in the Gold Library, within the private quarters of the castle, where the Howards actually live. Against the handsome gilded bookshelves, a stonking great television framed in the fireplace underlines that this is a home as well as a national treasure. 'It's not Brideshead every night,' says Renzullo. 'I had dinner with the family last night in the kitchen; it's not black tie and candelabras. They need this space to be functional.
'A lot of it is about simplifying. It sounds ridiculous, in this setting,' adds Renzullo, gesturing to the gold leaf gleaming across shelves and picture frames, 'but it's about applying just a little bit of minimalism to let the bolder parts shine.' He applied a heavy charcoal grey to the walls, as well as carrying on the gilding from the original 1790s bookshelves to the dado rails and window frames. He brought in console tables with rose-marble tops from another part of the house, and removed the curtains to allow the view of the inner courtyard and clock tower beyond to come into focus.
The work has been a collaboration between Renzullo and the country's finest upholsterers, curtain makers, plasterers, gilders and painters. The Long Gallery is the pride and joy of the restoration consultant Alec Cobbe. At 160ft, it's one of the longest in Europe and now glows in gentle coral, rather than the polite shades of the past, so its Canalettos and Bellottos stand out all the better.
This afternoon Renzullo is heading to the south of France for another project, but there's something spellbinding about Castle Howard, and he grew tearful on seeing the completion of the 'closest thing they've got to a State Bedroom. It features a bed by [John] Linnell, one of the greatest 18th-century furniture makers, and just the hangings on it took a year, using damask inspired by Linnell's designs in the V&A, woven on 300-year-old looms in Lyon. They finished and I took a step back; you feel this weight of history.'
The particular nature of the light in this bucolic corner of North Yorkshire, between York and the Scarborough coast, has been a source of inspiration for Renzullo. 'One of the most surprising things I've learnt is the true importance of taking time to test everything, be it a colour or a piece of furniture, and understanding light at different times of day, different points in the year. This isn't a house that can be designed remotely,' he says; he spends 'a great deal of time' in Yorkshire.
His morning ritual at Castle Howard includes a walk through woodland to the Temple of the Four Winds, a Palladian folly overlooking the parkland, to see the sun rise over the hills. 'It's a real lesson in humility. This place isn't about me or my aesthetic. The best compliment for me is when someone walks into a recently refurbished room at Castle Howard and doesn't know that I've been there.' Like a ghost, perhaps.
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