‘I was getting texts from my friends saying they’d been watching people having sex all over the house!’ laughs Blanche Howard, the 26-year-old daughter of the Hon Nicholas and Victoria Howard, current custodians of that majestic Baroque pile, Castle Howard.
Blanche is, of course, referring to Netflix’s racy Regency drama Bridgerton, which has mesmerised more than 82 million households worldwide since it was released last December. One of those households is Castle Howard – or Clyvedon Castle, as it’s called in the series – which doubles as the country estate of the Duke and Duchess of Hastings, Simon and Daphne Bassett (née Bridgerton).
‘I definitely binged on Bridgerton,’ says Blanche. ‘My parents and I thought it was great. What’s so interesting is that you are seeing the house as it would have been at that time,’ she adds, very much the Architectural Association student, as she leans elegantly on the studded leather fender in her late grandmother’s silk-panelled reading room.
Castle Howard has been home to the Howard family for more than 300 years and has a strong claim to being the most beautiful house in Britain. Set in 10,000 glorious acres on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, it was commissioned in 1699 by the 3rd Earl of Carlisle from Sir John Vanbrugh, who later conceived Blenheim Palace. Vanbrugh had never designed a house, and enlisted the great Nicholas Hawksmoor to help him, but the project wasn’t finished for more than 100 years, with the final elements completed in 1811. The 9th Earl of Carlisle left the property to his fifth son, Geoffrey, from whom Blanche’s family is descended (the earls of Carlisle made do with the enormous Naworth Castle in Cumbria).
Everyone from Queen Victoria to Sophia Loren has stayed here – Loren was captivated by the place and insisted on cooking pasta for the Howards when filming Lady L in the grounds in 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon was also shot here, as was, famously, the 1980s TV series Brideshead Revisited.
Under normal circumstances, more than 270,000 visitors flock to Castle Howard each year. The house itself contains 140 rooms; outside, there are temples, follies, a mausoleum and landscaped gardens to explore, while peacocks roam freely across the North Front. Due to Covid restrictions, however, on my visit only the grounds are open to the public, but as Blanche and I set off for a walk with the family’s lurcher, Poppy, it is as though a dazzling English rose had blended into the landscape, unfazed by the (still sizeable) crowds smiling at their selfie sticks by the Atlas Fountain. Indeed, the real star of this historic house goes by virtually unnoticed. With her long auburn hair, blue eyes and delicate porcelain skin, Blanche looks really quite like Daphne Bridgerton and could easily have stepped out of an 18th-century oil painting.
When the first lockdown descended last year, the tourists disappeared as Castle Howard’s gates closed indefinitely for the first time in almost 70 years (the house opened to the public in 1952). Strolling towards the Temple of the Four Winds (a raunchy spot that Bridgerton fans will recognise), Blanche remembers the extraordinary months during which the house stood still. ‘Obviously lockdown was not good for the business, so there was a lot of anxiety around that,’ she says. ‘But we were so lucky to spend that time here. No one from the past two generations has experienced the house without the public here. We flung all of the doors open, allowing the sunlight in. We were able to eat outside on the North Front, and we swam in the Great Lake every morning.’
It sounds magical – and almost as extraordinary as Blanche and her brother George’s joint 21st and 30th birthday party in 2015, when the family hosted the house’s largest ever sit-down dinner party. Three hundred guests, including Tom Naylor-Leyland, Sienna Vere Nicoll and India Alexander, filled a banqueting table in the Long Gallery and danced in the burnt-out southeast wing, which was damaged by fire in 1940 and is gradually being restored. The theme was surrealism: a vast chandelier made of 1,250 yellow washing-up gloves hung from the grand dome in the Great Hall, mannequins from the house’s costume gallery sat at the table with the guests, suckling pig was served, and after dinner, everyone jumped into the Atlas Fountain. Blanche wore an antlered headpiece by Stephen Jones that was itself a thing of wonder. Another memorable occasion was the nuit blanche party hosted by her grandfather George, ‘where everyone was dressed in silver and white, and the entire house was lit by candles’. Equally glittering was the Baroque-themed party Blanche’s parents gave in 2012 to mark their 20th wedding anniversary, her father’s 60th birthday and Blanche’s 18th. Guests danced to Clean Bandit in the Great Hall, while the Marchioness of Normanby, Rachel Johnson and Rebekah Brooks chatted in the state drawing rooms.
Blanche’s picturesque life at Castle Howard began after her uncle Simon Howard stepped down as director in 2015 and moved with his wife, Rebecca, and their two children to a manor house just outside the nearby town of Malton. He had inherited Castle Howard from his father (Blanche’s grandfather), Lord Howard of Henderskelfe, a former chairman of the BBC. Blanche was 21 when she, her brother and her parents came to live in the house – the same age as Daphne Bridgerton when she arrived at ‘Clyvedon’ with the Duke of Hastings.
Blanche settled in well, along with her father, Nick, an acclaimed photographer who had grown up in the house, her mother, Victoria, formerly the CEO of HarperCollins, and her brother George, now 34. The family had moved from a Bayswater townhouse to Castle Howard’s elegant East Wing, with its six grand bedrooms, sitting rooms and a glorious kitchen leading out to their private terrace, where Blanche and I have lunch.
As I spoon a warm salmon salad that Blanche has made onto my plate, I admire the sea of spring bulbs that is lighting up the scenic South Front. ‘The wow factor never really goes,’ Blanche says. ‘Every time I come down the drive, I am still just as amazed as I was the first time I came here.’ She pauses, considers: ‘It’s different now that I live in the house because I used to just come for events, parties, dinners or shoot weekends. Seeing it as more of a home is different. My dad used to speak about his upbringing here with such fond memories. I was never really able to share that with him, so now it’s lovely to share memories.’
Blanche and her father have plenty of other things in common. They both love digging through the archives for fabrics, helping to restore the house – and they share a passion for 1970s fashion. His collection of velour bell-sleeved blouses and Yves Saint Laurent cropped jackets now hangs in Blanche’s own wardrobe. Another thing they have in common is watching their beloved house being transformed into glamorous film and TV sets. ‘My dad had the best time growing up while Brideshead Revisited was being filmed,’ Blanche says. ‘They even used his clothes as costumes.’
Nicholas and his brothers – Simon, Anthony and Henry (who died in 2008) – got to hang out with Jeremy Irons on the Brideshead set; and in 2018, Blanche and her cousins Bella and Grania Howard spent a blissful week with the Arctic Monkeys when the indie rock band filmed its music video Four Out of Five at the house. ‘We had amazing dinners each night,’ Blanche says. ‘We even ended up in the video.’
When Blanche isn’t appearing in music videos, digging through the family’s 18th-century silk fan collection or casting ceramics in her London kitchen, she is wading through lengthy architecture tomes as a third-year student at the Architectural Association in Bloomsbury.
Little wonder that she has been inspired to become an architect, with the works of Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor around her. Blanche shows me the room that entrances her the most, and it’s not difficult to see why. The Great Hall is a remarkable 80ft-high space, with a spectacular dome adorned with Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini murals. ‘Vanbrugh was also a playwright, and he has this incredible way of designing buildings with a theatrical element,’ she says. ‘When I was younger, one of my best friends and I would sneak off and run up the secret passageway that goes all the way up to the top of the dome. We weren’t supposed to go there, but we would climb up to the roof and do silly photoshoots while all the visitors would look at us in disbelief.’ Rather than simply focusing on the rich wallpapers, vast rooms and pomp, Blanche is interested in the house’s structural splendour: ‘Castle Howard was one of the first English estates to introduce the idea of a corridor,’ she tells me. ‘There are all of these incredible passages.’
The number of jaw-dropping rooms is endless. There’s the Turquoise Drawing Room, where paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough and Stubbs hang alongside spectacular scenes of 18th-century Venice by Canaletto’s talented nephew Bellotto. There’s the family’s private chapel, with interiors by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. And there’s the Archbishop’s Room, the bedroom Bridgerton fans will instantly recognise – although they won’t have spotted the ‘room monitors’ that Castle Howard assigned to stand alongside actors Regé-Jean Page and Phoebe Dynevor during the filming of their love scenes, to ensure the 18th-century silk-covered four-poster bed remained intact. Blanche says they ‘didn’t know where to look’. But not for long. ‘It was 4am and the actors kept forgetting their lines, so [the monitors] went from feeling awkward to knowing all their lines!’
First Brideshead and now Bridgerton – but Castle Howard has a grandeur and a glory of its own. Still, are there any plans for a Regency-themed ball? ‘I’ll definitely wait a few years until I host a period-themed party,’ Blanche says, with a smile. Would she go as Daphne? ‘We’ll see.’
This article was originally published in the July issue
Subscribe now to get 3 issues of Tatler for just £1, plus free home delivery and free instant access to the digital editions
More from Tatler
