FACING THE FUTURE
A Palladian hall built by the Walpole family has been lovingly restored by its new owners, a pair of interior-design aficionados, preserving its hallowed hallways for centuries to come. By Charlotte Brook
How a visionary couple have revivified a Palladian hall in Norfolk
After winding through mile upon mile of parkland along the drive by dusk, I eventually pull up outside Wolterton Hall and feel minuscule. This magnificent mansion was commissioned by the aristocratic diplomat Horatio Walpole in the early 1720s, at the same time that his elder brother, Sir Robert, Britain’s first prime minister, was building Houghton Hall a few villages to the west. The architect Thomas Ripley, who had worked on the latter, designed this smaller sister property in a similarly Palladian style and, together with Holkham and Raynham Hall, the grand family piles came to be recognised as the four ‘power houses’ of Norfolk. Wolterton remained the least-known – until, perhaps, now.
For it is not the current Lord Walpole who greets me in the candlelit library, but its new owners, Peter Sheppard and Keith Day, antiquarians, art-collectors, interior designers and partners since meeting as students at the University of North London’s School of Architecture in the late 1970s. Over 40 years of creative collaboration, as well as setting up their own design business (which they eventually sold to the Conran group), they have restored, lived in and lucratively sold on properties including Hayes Hall in south Norfolk, a Venetian palazzo, a friary behind Westminster Abbey and 33 Fitzroy Square in London. The latter had once been home to the Omega Workshops, a design enterprise founded by the Bloomsbury Group, inspiring Day to start collecting Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell paintings. These now hang alongside other works of 20th-century British art in a charming room-cum-gallery looking out onto the garden here at Wolterton. In their most ambitious project to date, the couple are meticulously and imaginatively bringing the house back to life after three decades of abandonment, turning a relic into a home that they are starting to think they may never leave.
Sheppard and Day bought the estate in 2016 from the 10th Baron Walpole, who had made the decision, after his father died, to part ways with Wolterton, along with everything in it. Consequently, as well as the building itself, the couple managed to snap up a lot of its treasures,
including a four-metre-wide family portrait of the Walpoles (which cost half a million pounds), glass Georgian chandeliers galore and several squash-court-size tapestries. These now rub shoulders with Sheppard Day objets from almost every era and culture, and the resulting aesthetic is sublime.
Each floor has a different atmosphere: the ground level, where the couple spend the majority of time day-to-day, is the most relaxed, with an entrance lobby dotted with Moroccan lanterns, an airy open-plan kitchen and the library, where leather-bound Walpole volumes are now joined by an Elizabeth David cookbook collection. One stone hall is an ode to Sir John Soane’s Museum (the society for which Sheppard used to be chairman), where the walls groan with convex gilt mirrors, classical casts, carvings and a torso of Antinous. ‘We’re trying to make it as theatrical as we can,’ Sheppard says of their intuitive style. ‘We just buy things we like, and figure out afterwards what will work where. What’s really important to us is that spaces feel comfortable and cosy… but also, I suppose, grand and a bit spectacular.’
This certainly applies to the palatial state-rooms on the first floor, which include the Saloon, Dining Room and a Houghton-esque Marble Hall. The predecessors’ presence is cleverly corralled into a newly created Portrait Room, where an army of Walpoles peer down from walls that have been stripped to expose raw panelling the new owners plan to leave unvarnished. ‘Rather like the portraits in Hogwarts, I like to think they can now all chat to one another when you leave the room,’ Sheppard says, wryly pointing out a new addition to this hall of fame: a pug-dog miniature, in tribute to their own beloved pair Coco and Trump (Hogarth’s pet, not the President).
A vast lightwell at the top of the house gives you the impression that the storey is floating in the sky. Coffered arches lead off the illuminated central walkway to the
lower-ceilinged, intimate bedrooms; those that are finished are decorated with jewel-coloured, hand-block-printed wallpapers by Watts of Westminster, and now have their own small but perfectly formed marble ensuites. As in the estate’s cottages, which the couple are sprucing up for self-catered holiday lets, antiques and William Morris textiles mix with the finest modern amenities: Vispring beds, state-of-the-art Hansgrohe rain showers, digital Roberts radios and Le Creuset pans. So far, the Steward’s House, Garden House and Treasury, along with the sevenbedroom East Wing, are available to rent, and by the end of this year, the State Bedroom will become a lavish suite, complete with a hidden champagne fridge. Then, the couple will turn their attention to the attic’s 5,000 square feet – installing a gym, sauna, billiard-room and mini kitchen – followed by the stables, gatehouse and the gamekeeper’s lodge, which they plan to transform into a homage to Charleston. Eventually, the whole estate will have a total of 26 bedrooms across all buildings and will be available for exclusive use a couple of times a year.
Sheppard tells me that when Horatio Walpole’s nephew Horace – the politician and aesthete who built the Gothic gem Strawberry Hill in Twickenham – first visited Wolterton, he observed that ‘it is a good house. If only my uncle had spent 18 pence more in every room, it would be a fine one.’ You can’t help thinking that the modern-day Walpoles – with whom relations are, I am told, ‘very cordial’ – must feel they struck lucky when their family seat ended up in the care of Sheppard and Day. Here are two dynamic interior designers with the spare pence and bold vision to take Wolterton into the next century, a desire to share it with as many people as possible and a reverence for its past matched only by an enthusiasm for its future. For more information, visit www.woltertonpark.co.uk.