‘DOWNTON SHABBY’
An American commoner takes on 50,000-square-foot English castle, once an ancestral home
People who search genealogy websites often find birth and marriage records, newspaper clippings, faded photographs or maybe a long-lost relative.
Hopwood DePree found a 60-room English manor.
As a child growing up in Holland, Michigan, in the 1970s, DePree was transfixed when his beloved maternal grandfather, Pap, a history buff, told him about a huge slice of rolling land across the ocean where his forebears had a grand house called Hopwood Castle.
A castle in Britain owned by his family? Named for his family? No way.
Fast forward 3 ½ decades. DePree, by then an actor and producer in Los Angeles, was at his computer early one night in the spring of 2013, trawling an ancestry website.
The past had become a favorite destination for him after Pap’s death in 2008 and, two years later, the sudden death of his father, Thomas, from a massive heart attack. DePree was left uncertain about the way forward. Tracing his roots was a comfort.
That fateful evening, he saw a link to a story about a Lord Hopwood of Hopwood Hall and an old black-and-white photo of a stately home in Middleton, England, just outside Manchester. Increasingly curious, DePree made some email inquiries and booked a flight to see firsthand the family seat.
A 50,000-square-foot, brick-andstone manor built in a quadrangle around a timber-framed hall, Hopwood Hall had seen better centuries.
The roof leaked prodigiously, dry rot was ascendant, moisture seeped from the walls, plaster was falling from the ceilings, windows were missing panes, floors were missing boards, many sections of the house had been vandalized.
Trees were growing out of the chimneys.
And yet … there were doors dotted with rivets from the medieval period — some sections of the house date to 1426 — and doors with their original hand-forged hardware. The wood-paneled walls in one of the parlors were decorated with intricate carvings from baseboard to ceiling. The fireplace in a room known as the reception hall was embellished with an iteration of the Hopwood family coat of arms; the family’s heraldic animal, a stag; and the Hopwood family motto, “By Degrees.”
“When I walked in, I felt something in me change almost immediately. I knew this place was special,” DePree, 52, said. “But I was told during that first visit that if nothing was done, within five or 10 years, Hopwood Hall would crumble.”
He chronicles his efforts to save the hall in “Downton Shabby: One American’s Ultimate DIY Adventure Restoring His Family’s English Castle,” a memoir published late last month.
Hopwoods lived in the house until the early 1920s, according to the book. But after the two heirs were killed during World War
I, their grieving elderly parents closed up the property and moved to London. A cotton company used the hall during World War II, and in 1946 an order of monks moved in for a few decades. By the late 1980s, the property had become the responsibility of the local authority, which had neither the will nor the wherewithal to maintain it. Then came DePree.
The “DIY” in the book’s title is, perhaps, more than a bit misleading: DePree isn’t the guy reglazing the windows, plastering the walls, stabilizing the foundation or replacing floorboards. Hopwood Hall’s longtime caretaker, Bob Wall, has joked that the acronym really stands for “Dim Inexperienced Yank.”
But credit where credit is due: The Yank has come a long way from the humiliating moment when he stood in a parking lot of a Home Depot in Los Angeles, almost in tears because he couldn’t figure out how to work the stick-on tiles he had bought for his bathroom floor.
“I’ve learned how to mix mortar and make plaster molds. I’ve learned to do pointing on bricks,” said DePree, who sold his house in Los Angeles five years ago and moved full time to Middleton to immerse himself in the preservation efforts. “But I wouldn’t say at all that I’m a skilled craftsman by any stretch of the imagination.”
Still, he has done plenty of heavy lifting since 2017, when he signed a contract with the Rochdale
Borough Council, the local authority, to assume responsibility for Hopwood Hall. (The Council had first verified his familial bona fides.) The deal gave DePree five years to come up with a practicable and fully detailed plan to save his ancestral home and create a sustainable model to keep the lights on.
“Hopwood was just feeling his way when I first met him, but he’s become more confident,” said Geoff Wellens, a local historian. “I truly believe that if anyone can get the job done, it’s him. It’s his family’s old home. He has that family tie.”
Bit by bit, DePree has become the public face of the effort, its cheerleader in chief and dedicated fundraiser. Recent grants from Historic England, a government agency, and the Rochdale Borough Council total more than $1 million.
Soon after his move to Britain, DePree started a YouTube channel, posting videos for friends and supporters to chart the progress of the restoration. He also wrote a one-man show about his travails and triumphs, and toured it at comedy festivals around the country.
The price tag for the home improvement is $13 million, with annual operating costs estimated at $800,000, DePree said. Proceeds from his show have been contributed to the cause; a chunk of the royalties from his book will go toward it, too.
“Many country houses in the U.K. have had to find ways to reinvent themselves to keep up with the enormous costs of operating, staffing and maintenance, and Hopwood Hall is on a similar path,” DePree said.
He hopes to turn the manor into an arts hub for the local community and a tourist destination. A wedding destination, too. Hopwood Hall will have around 25 bedrooms to accommodate the festivities.
His grandfather, he said, would be proud.
“He loved history and he loved his Hopwood identity,” DePree said. “Maybe several hundred years from now, people will read about this project and there will be one or two lines about me.”