A friend of mine described my home, Eastnor Castle, as Saltburn meets Harry Potter via The Arabian Nights. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but Eastnor does defy easy description. This is where Tom and Shiv had their wedding party in Succession; and the interiors were restored in the 1990s under the visionary eye of a professor at Saint Martin’s School of Art whose own Chelsea house was the set for Uncle Monty’s home in Withnail and I; there’s a Rat Pack connection – Sammy Davis Jr. rode a horse here in the ’60s – and our first paying guest was Harvey Keitel.
There’s been a house on the land around Eastnor since the 16th century, but the castle I grew up in dates from 1812. It’s a completely mystical place, full of surprises. One of which is how relaxed and inviting and fun it is. Maybe this is because of the enthusiasm with which it has been put together, bit by bit, by successive owners. The castle is full of an extraordinary, eclectic mix of furniture, furnishings, art and objects, gathered from all over the world. This makes it completely unique. Eastnor doesn’t obey any rules. You never know what’s around the next corner.
Witness the Land Rovers. My grandfather knew these cars from his time as an SOE (Special Operations Executive) in WWII and, together with Land Rover – which is headquartered an hour away – created 60 miles of track full of ravines and rivers for the firm to use as a secret testing ground. From 1962 to the present, Land Rovers have been roaming our grounds. The Range Rover was developed here in the ’70s; its official colour is called “Eastnor Green”.
The First Earl Somers, who built the castle in 1812, wanted something imposing, and from the outside it’s certainly very austere. Set in amazing countryside, on the edge of a huge lake and surrounded by trees, it’s a fantasy of a castle in the Welsh borders. The scale is crazy, and when you walk in you have 60ft ceilings, but despite the space it somehow feels cosy. This is because of the richness and sumptuousness of the decoration which, for me, speaks of youthful enthusiasm. Much of it comes from the Third Earl Somers, who was an aesthete and a great collector. As a young man he travelled and brought back all sorts of wonderful pieces, like Renaissance armour. We even have an armoured horse in a hallway!
There are these amazing tapestries owned by the Medicis from a palazzo in Mantua, and a beautiful dragon chandelier from the Corsini Palace. And a four-poster bed that belonged to a cardinal who became a saint. The Third Earl visited Bedouin tribes, and the Great Hall still has the original 19th-century peacock-design Persian wallpaper with an Arabic inscription on it. He also employed Augustus Pugin, then in his 20s, to design parts of the castle. Pugin is known for his Gothic design for the Houses of Parliament, and his Gothic Revival work at Eastnor is delightfully colourful and decorative.
After WWII, the place was shut up because it was too expensive to run until the ’80s, when my parents decided to revive it and asked the extraordinary Bernard Nevill to help. He was a lecturer at the Royal College and St Martin’s art schools and became design director of Liberty of London. He’d taught Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes and his Liberty printed textiles were bought by Parisian fashion houses, including Yves Saint Laurent and Balmain. A bold maximalist who said he loved “unlovable things”, Bernard was let loose on Eastnor and arranged furniture that had been kept in storage and augmented it with Persian rugs and the many antiques he found. He also commissioned new things like some super-sized sofas to turn the Great Hall into a “drawing room”.
Today’s Eastnor bears the imprint of all these maverick people and the drama they created here. So come see it. Or even better, hire it for a party. Or, if you prefer, learn to drive a Land Rover off-road on the test track.
