A collaboration twisting back through time and personalities...
Looks can be deceptive. From the outside, Herefordshire’s Eastnor Castle, designed by architect Robert Smirke in a Norman revival style, is imposing – brutal even – all 4,000 tonnes of stone and turrets. Yet on the inside is a mind-boggling mélange of generations of shifting Regency, Victorian, and Italianate tastes with a generous topping of ‘Moorish’ architecture. Developed in the western Islamic world Built for the 2nd Baron (Lord) Somers between 1810 and 1824, the house bears the imprint of successive generations and has seen both glory days and dormant decay.
Today, Imogen Hervey-Bathurst, daughter and owner of James Hervey Bathurst, is master minding the castle’s next chapter, and making its sensorial overload a calling card. “Eastnor is highly immersive it is about the design and the experience and I felt part of the retelling could be through creative collaborations”. The threads between Eastnor and Watts1874 twist back through time and personalities. Friends and colleagues in the mid nineteenth century the third Earl Somers and George Gilbert Scott, prolific English Gothic Revival architect and founding father of Watts & Co. moved and played in the same fashionable proto bohemianism of that period.
Much later in the 1990’s, following decades of decay and neglect when Sarah Hervey-Bathurst, Imogen’s mother was charged with the task of an entire make over of the castle to bring warmth and colour into the rooms, Watts was her initial go to for inspiration and supply. Entirely fitting that 150 years later there is a meeting of minds and the art and antiques acquired by the third Earl creates the dipping pool for a deserving collaboration.
