North Yorkshire's film-star castle set to earn its keep by hosting paying guests

The Guardian

25-04-2025

Laurence Olivier's elderly Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited died in it and a pair of hot young newlywed aristocrats in Bridgerton made out in it.
Now someone with deep pockets may be able to occupy that same 18th-century canopy bed at Castle Howard. In the morning they might take breakfast in a room with Canaletto paintings on the wall and Meissen plates on which to butter their toast.
The custodians of a place that is arguably England's grandest, most beautiful country house are considering next year bringing in high-end hospitality packages.
It comes as the North Yorkshire house on Thursday revealed the results of a major restoration project, five years in the planning, which included updates to rooms, a rehang, a transformation of its Long Gallery and a fabulous recreation of a Tapestry Drawing Room destroyed in a fire in 1940.
The house is already well known from being used in TV and film, including Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, the 1981 ITV series and the 2008 film Brideshead Revisited and more recently in Netflix's Bridgerton, where characters played by Regé-Jean Page and Phoebe Dynevor turn a fake courtship into a blissful marriage.
It has also been occasionally hired for private hospitality events such as Ellie Goulding's wedding reception.
The idea of it being used as a kind of expensive, exclusive Airbnb would appear to be the next step.
'We've always referred to this as a living house,' said Nicholas Howard, a descendant of Charles Howard, the third Earl of Carlisle who commissioned the house in 1699. 'It's not a museum. And if you're going to call it a living house, you've got to make it a living house. And that involves having people in it.'
There is also a more practical reason, said his wife, Victoria Howard, a former chief executive of HarperCollins. 'We need income for the next burnt-out room. We've got quite a few more.'
Having people pay to stay is a likely project for next year, she said. 'We would probably do it no more than a couple of times a year because it would interfere with the day visitors.'
Those day visitors number nearly 300,000 a year. They come to marvel at not only the notable architecture, conceived by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, but to enjoy acres of sweeping parkland filled with lakes, fountains, statues, temples and pyramids.
One of the bleakest moments in the house's history was the 1940 fire, which took place while it was being used as a wartime girls school. It destroyed Castle Howard's incredible dome and more than 40 rooms.
The dome was restored by George Howard in 1962 and income from Brideshead Revisited allowed the reconstruction of the Garden Hall and New Library.
The recreation of the lost Tapestry Drawing Room is arguably the star attraction of the latest restoration project.
The tapestries were woven for the room in 1706 by John Vanderbank and depict the four seasons in scenes taken from the work of David Teniers.
Luckily, when the fire happened they were not in the room. 'They had been on a sort of trek around the house to various places, each of which was more inappropriate than the last,' said Howard.
Now they are back where they should be, in the newly restored and furnished room, for the first time in centuries.
'This is the first time I've seen them really because you can now get up close to them and that's important,' he said. 'You can see the detail.
'In some ways, I'm sort of getting to know them properly for the first time in my life, which is really nice.'
The renewal project has not been without its difficulties along the way, not least the choice of painting to hang over the mantelpiece.
'I said that I felt it ought to be definitely some sort of classical scene, an allegory or a historical scene or whatever,' said Howard.
Auction sites were scoured and the ideal painting was found in Barcelona – a work by the Italian baroque painter, Sebastiano Ricci.
It was successfully bought. 'We then discovered that, actually, it had been sold from this house in 1991,' said Howard. 'For a lot less than we bought it for.'
Castle Howard's 21st Century Renaissance opens to the public on 25 April.