Exploring Chatsworth House- Englands Most Stately Home

Chatsworth is that kind of place that you can get to know objects or get to learn about history. So there are, if you like, two houses here, the public route and that's where the exhibitions are shown and mounted and then there are rooms that the family use. I mean it literally is a living space. I've known it with William's grandparents living here when we were friends and I would come and stay here. I've known it with his parents living here and then now I live here with our family. Some of the rooms are sort of famous rooms and you know them from the guidebook or the visitor book but you know they take on a new and different life when a different family's possessions and things kind of get shuntled in, in our case the kind of ping-pong table. Bess of Hardwick is known for producing that beautiful building you can see from the M1, Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall and that was remarked on because it's effectively about the most modern building you could possibly dream up and she then married and encouraged the owner of this land to build this house and you can tell it's a house of the 16th century, mid-16th because it's built around a courtyard which is why we're always getting lost. When I moved in to Chatsworth I started thinking about paint and I had the desire to make a paint, a range of paint and I wrote to Edward Bulmer. I admired him for creating this paint company but also as a respected interior decorator and I wrote him an email and I said please would you consider coming to Chatsworth and making a range of paint and at that moment I don't think any of us thought that it would end up being a range of 24 colours but that is what happened. And so I just took my time and just in a way didn't look for any colours, just let them look for me and also reflected on what Laura had been saying, how she was responding to particular colours but also how she was articulating what she needed because she's got a very good eye too. This was going to be a really insightful exercise in what I call, what the French call, you know that you sort of, you kind of half close your eye and you see and hear, smell, you sense colour and that made it a fabulously interesting project. When you climb the Great Stair you can break right which is where I am now. It's got this very beautiful flock paper, flock was a literally a wool dust. It's this incredible sort of chrome green meets raw umber kind of green and it just struck me that would be an amazing colour for those rooms where you want a little bit of kind of warmth and drama. We're in the sketch galleries and this is the part of the house that was originally used to house the all master drawings and this part of the house really is dedicated to Georgiana who was married to the fifth duke and you can see her behind us in this portrait by Maria Cosway. She's actually got six toes in the picture. Georgiana was a collector, she was kind of a fashion icon of her day but she collected minerals. One of the minerals really gave us the idea for this wonderful colour, this kind of reddy purpley rich colour that has taken her name. In the lower library, although the room is a decorative tour de force really, what's holding this all together is a very beautiful kind of grey green. This is one of the few colours perhaps where I really tried quite hard to replicate the colour and brought it back to sight. Broadly speaking it's pretty good. So we've called this this beautiful green crace after the decorating firm, multi-generational decorating firm, and they kind of were to decorating then what kind of Colfax and Fowler are, if you like, to decorating now. You know, a really safe pair of hands that understood how to ornament these great stately homes. So we're in the old kitchen and this cupboard is left in here like a relic from the past because this room is currently used as the joiner's workshop. But this cupboard sits here with its old paint and all the copper pans that have been stored in here with a sort of perspex front to keep them clean and safe. And I was particularly drawn to the paint, this strange kind of greeny grey, kind of rather old-fashioned, odd colour, and I dragged Edward in here to have a look at it. And one of the paints in the range has since been called old kitchen and it's from this cupboard. One of the glories of Chatsworth is the beautiful honey-coloured stone that it's built in and that stone actually permeates the entire building. So we're inside here and you can see that it's got this ochre, warm ochre, almost I imagine it's an iron oxide undertone. The main quarry this stone was coming from is called Burntwood. So we've mixed the colour that really gives an evocation of that lovely warmth and called it Burntwood quite appropriately. This is a stone that's used throughout the house, almost for all of the windowsills, and again it comes from a quarry on the estate called Once a Week. The quarry is still open to this day and the local hotels that Laura's working on, all the tabletops are usually made with. And it got its name because that's literally payday, that the quarrymen were all paid once a week as opposed to over a longer period of time. We're in the sculpture gallery and this was a new gallery built by the 6th Duke where he brought together his collection of then contemporary sculpture and my parents-in-law actually reset this room from old drawings and records. Sometimes actually we've had dinner here in the evenings for very special moments. This is probably at the lighter end of our spectrum in the range and of course we've given this beautiful new whiter the same name as the sculptor, Canova. Chatsworth has always adapted and sort of taken on a new life. It's always admitted the public, fed them, encouraged them, published endless guidebooks I imagine. And of course now into this century it's rewritten the rules of how to inhabit and treat responsibly a country house. So the art collections here are just becoming more interesting.