Making a Centuries-Old English Castle Feel More Like Home
Renovations in Yorkshire included the revamp of a 30-room wing where a descendant of the estate’s builder still lives.
4 min
Castle Howard, one of the grandest of English country houses, is taking the long way home. The domed Yorkshire residence, designed by Baroque architect John Vanbrugh for the third Earl of Carlisle, was started in 1699 and completed at the beginning of the 19th century, only to be partially gutted by fire in 1940. The earl’s descendants have been putting it back together ever since.
Next month, that ongoing process will reach a critical point when the Tapestry Drawing Room, a once-resplendent space that fell victim to the fire, will complete a six-year-long restoration that cost about $700,000.
The castle also serves as a primary home for Nicholas Howard, a descendant of the earl, and his wife, Victoria Howard. The two have also recently redecorated their living quarters in the building, adding everything from a $32,000 fireplace to new slipcovers for the kitchen chairs.
Located about midway between London and Edinburgh, Castle Howard has served as the setting for film and TV shoots including the Netflix series “Bridgerton” and the 1980s British television series “Brideshead Revisited.” It has around 180,000 square feet of space and some 100 rooms, many of them open to the public for events and tours. For generations, members of the Howard family have lived in the relatively isolated East Wing, one of the oldest areas of the castle.
While the grandiose “state rooms,” in the Southeast Wing, were designed from the beginning to impress visitors, the East Wing was built on a smaller, if still impressive, scale. It functions as a self-contained house-within-a-house—or perhaps, a mansion-within-a-castle—with six bedrooms, five full bathrooms, and some 30 rooms in total.
Nicholas, a 72-year-old photographer, grew up with his family in the East Wing. He and Victoria, a 71-year-old retired publishing executive, have overseen the management of the castle and its 8,900 acres since 2015. The couple split their time between Castle Howard and London, but “we spend about 80% of our time here,” says Victoria.
Unlike many of Britain’s baronial country houses, which were only used seasonally, Castle Howard was “always intended as a 12-months-a-year house,” says Victoria, who was previously the CEO and publisher of HarperCollins UK. HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp .
The estate contains a whole village, called Coneysthorpe, and a number of landmark structures and elements, including the Howard family’s columned mausoleum, the massive Victorian-era Atlas Fountain, and an 18th-century obelisk designed by Vanbrugh.
The newly reconfigured Tapestry Room will be unveiled in April; a chief attraction will be its circa-1706 tapestry series depicting the four seasons. In storage during World War II, the tapestries survived the fire, which broke out while the castle was in use as a makeshift wartime girls’ school.
In the run-up to the big reveal, the Howards have been moving their art and objects around to fill in holes created by relocated pieces. An 1820s cloud study by British painter John Constable, for example, has been moved from Nicholas’s bedroom to the much-used Lake Sitting Room in the East Wing, where it joins one of the castle’s signature works of art—an early-16th century Venetian double portrait, attributed to Giorgione, that the fifth earl acquired in 1798.
The Lake Sitting Room is one of the Howards’ living spaces that has recently received a freshening up from Remy Renzullo, a 33-year-old American interior decorator, who added 19th-century French table lamps. Changes to other rooms include new French wallpaper ($3,885), and new hand-woven floor coverings ($12,952). A new Italian marble fireplace for the sitting room, based on Vanbrugh drawings, cost around $32,362.
Renzullo, who divides his time between the U.S. and Europe, also made changes to the Archbishop’s Bedroom, the family’s primary guest room, which is off limits to the public. Large naval pictures were removed in order to highlight the room’s rare 19 undefined -century Japanese wallpaper. Renzullo also redid the 18 undefined -century canopy bed with new French silk damask coverings. Viewers of “Brideshead Revisited” might remember the room as the place where Lord Marchmain, played by Laurence Olivier, dies.
“Brideshead Revisited,” based on the 1945 novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, is now indelibly linked with Castle Howard. Waugh visited the castle in the late 1930s, and the Howards believe the property at least partially inspired him to create the fictional, dome-topped Brideshead Castle. Jeffrey Manley, an American author affiliated with the Evelyn Waugh Society, said most of the details about Brideshead Castle were based on other sources, but that the conspicuous dome likely draws on Castle Howard.
Key locations in the series remain integrated into Howard family life. Nicholas and Victoria were married in the castle’s chapel, a monument to the Victorian-era Arts and Crafts movement that appeared in “Brideshead Revisited.” The Howards generally attend public services there at Easter and a few other times a year.
Though the East Wing is their base, other areas of the castle are also reserved for the family, including the New Library, which Nicholas uses as his office. The 1940 fire destroyed the space where the New Library is now located. Nicholas’ father, George Howard, used the proceeds from the filming of “Brideshead Revisited” to create and furnish the new room.
Though they have dozens of rooms to choose from, the Howards—like most families—spend much of their time in the kitchen. “It’s the warmest room in the house,” says Victoria. Nicholas does the cooking: “I do like making a decent roast,” he says, adding, apropos of the estate’s North Yorkshire setting, “I make a very good Yorkshire pudding.”
For more formal meals, the family has an adjoining dining room that Renzullo has recently reimagined. It was previously presided over by 18 undefined -century Meissen porcelain, which inspired the blue-painted walls. Renzullo repainted the walls a shade of terracotta, which now plays off rare 18 undefined -century English porcelain that had been on display in the public side of the castle. His goal, he says, was to create a room that “will read beautifully by candlelight.” The once- private Meissen has now gone over to the public side. The castle’s boundary between public and private spheres, says Victoria, can be pretty porous. “You can just swap things around.”
The couple declined to comment on how much they have spent on long-term renovation costs. Neil Quinn of Yiangou Architects, a British practice specializing in restoring historic country houses, says full renovations of historic homes can now cost between $972 to $1164 per square foot—or up to $35 million for a 30,000-square-foot home.
“There is always something needing doing, and the upkeep is enormous,” Victoria says, citing not just the house itself, but the numerous other structures and landscaping elements that make up the wider estate.
The current adult admission price is 27 pounds, or about $35, at Castle Howard, which received about 260,000 visitors in 2023, according to the UK’s Association of Leading Visitor Attractions. In what will be an added source of income, the Howards said they plan to start renting out the whole castle on occasion for overnight stays.
For Nicholas, the pros and cons balance out.
“You live in the shop,” he says. “On the other hand, you’re living in a work of art.”
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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