Often what is ancient is the precursor of modernity. Steeped in history and heritage, the estate has been in the family for centuries and has been carefully maintained and restored to represent its fine history.

Elegance is

 

Understanding and nurturing the heartbeat of the Hall was our starting point. We wanted to evoke the spirit of this Jacobean family home using the finest 21st Century techniques.

 

Lime plaster, mineral paints the colour of parchment and bone and rock, the honouring of wood and stone and a celebration of light, eliminating everything but the essential, have created spaces of limpid purity and ease.

Nature rules

 

The Hall sits in its own secret valley – the Park reeling up into the Snowdonian hills and mountains glittering with lunar lakes and sacred stones and wells while the gardens thread the wooded hillside echoing with birdsong and erupting into explosions of colour when the rhododendrons bloom. It is Andrew Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade.’

We needed to release the interior soul of the Hall and let the elements it contained breathe. The reflected light of Glyn Cywarch’s world plays across simply decorated bedrooms with bathrooms of classic 1930s luxury. The Long Room and the Dining Room are focused by their fireplaces and the glimmering polished cement floor. The oak stairs lit by a bronze oak leaf chandelier.

The gardens have been restored and reinterpreted by Sarah Husband with a revolutionary nod to 17th Centruy planting – the yew walk leading into a bluebell glade, nut and fruit trees planted in a wildflower meadow in the walled garden, a fernery of slate and moss in the shadow of the Hall and a hydrangea walk leading to the Gatehouse. Scented hedged bowers create the magic of discovery – a rose garden with a sluice of running water from the waterfall – but always held in the embrace of a view of the mountains and the sea and sky.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.