Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Looks can be deceptive. From the outside, Herefordshire\u2019s Eastnor Castle, designed by architect Robert\u00a0Smirke in a Norman revival style, is imposing \u2013 brutal even \u2013 all\u00a04,000 tonnes of stone and turrets. Yet on the inside is a mind-boggling m\u00e9lange of gothic, Italian renaissance and regency baronial styles. Between the handpainted coffered ceilings, the Pugin scheme in the Gothic Drawing Room, multi-panel tapestries and marquetry, every surface is dense with decoration.\u00a0Built 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 of owner James Hervey-Bathurst, is masterminding the castle\u2019s next chapter \u2013 and making its sensorial overload a calling card. She grew up at Eastnor, and in 2023 became\u00a0director of what is now a visitor attraction, wedding venue and film location (the castle featured in\u00a0season one of Succession as a location for Shiv and Tom\u2019s wedding), having formerly worked as director of investment research at Stanhope Capital.\u00a0One bold new venture is the creation of wallpapers, tableaux sc\u00e9niques and textiles with specialist maker Watts 1874, the soft furnishings and interior decoration business set up by architects George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner in partnership with George Gilbert Scott junior. \u201cEastnor is highly immersive, it is about the design and the experience, and I felt part of the retelling could be through creative collaborations,\u201d explains Imogen, now in her late 30s and one of three sisters (Isabella and Nancy), with two half-sisters (Stella and Minna) as well.\u00a0Watts 1874, which has long adorned grand schemes including Ham House in Surrey, Powis Castle in Wales and the University of Oxford\u2019s Bodleian Library, has proved the\u00a0ideal partner. \u201cIt is a big undertaking. People normally\u00a0associate collaborations as reproductions, but at\u00a0Eastnor we don\u2019t have samples or an archive so the patterns and\u00a0details are taken directly from the rooms,\u201d says Imogen of the meticulous process involving geometric calibration cameras and digital mapping. The\u00a0technology\u00a0allows 3D features \u2013 such as the coffered\u00a0ceiling in the Dining Room \u2013 to be turned into trompe-l\u2019oeil 2D wallpapers, 17th-century mythological seascape tapestries in the Long Library (originally from\u00a0a\u00a0palazzo in Mantua) into scenic murals, and a\u00a0Trast\u00e1mara painted leather screen in the Great Hall to be translated into papers and fabrics.\u00a0Launching at the D\u00e9co Off design festival in Paris in\u00a0January, the Watts 1874 x Eastnor Castle Collection, which comprises digital as well as hand-blocked papers and fabrics, will be primed for private residences, hotels, restaurants and clubs \u2013 plus anyone clamouring for unabashed opulence. \u201cWe don\u2019t do little flowers \u2013 we are all about scale, historically designing for huge properties and churches \u2013 and, my God, does Eastnor have scale!\u201d says Marie-S\u00e9verine de Caraman Chimay, managing director of Watts 1874 and a fifth-generation Scott. Her grandmother resurrected the firm in the postwar years when the decoration industry was still on its knees. \u00a0The threads between Eastnor and Watts 1874 (which previously had two arms\u00a0to the business \u2013 ecclesiastical\/ceremonial and interior decor) twist back through time and personalities. The firm\u2019s creative director Fiona Flint worked with Imogen\u2019s mother, Sarah Hervey-Bathurst, on a series of bespoke wallcoverings in the 1990s. In the research, Flint identified further original Watts decor at the castle.Imogen herself became aware of the brand at a dinner party sitting next to Robert Hoare, CEO of the ecclesiastical business, Watts & Co. She later visited the atelier in Westminster. \u201cIt was an amazing old building full of young people from Central Saint Martins. There were pieces for the Vatican and coronation robes that were all\u00a0handmade. We talked about the architect Pugin, who worked on the castle, and I felt an instinctive connection,\u201d says Imogen who then met Robert\u2019s sister, Marie-S\u00e9verine, at the Chelsea Harbour showroom for textiles and design where she recognised some of the patterns at Eastnor.Imogen takes me on a tour of the castle\u2019s grand rooms; she is not hidebound by tradition or the weight of history. Her own childhood was not \u201cgrand\u201d or princess-like. \u201cWe lived in a flat on the other side of the\u00a0castle with its own entrance so in that way it was not\u00a0dissimilar to living in a London apartment,\u201d she says. \u201cThe grand rooms had fallen into disrepair after a long period lying dormant, land had been sold off and loads of things put away. My grandparents lived like church mice, with buckets and drips and wartime blackout curtains. They simply did not\u00a0have the means to restore it.\u201dThe romanticism of Eastnor stems from the lives and passions of Imogen\u2019s ancestor the 3rd Earl Somers and his Anglo-Indian wife, Virginia. They lived a\u00a0proto-bohemian life in a circle that included William Thackeray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf and artist George Frederic Watts, and also travelled extensively, picking up art and antiques along the way. \u201cHe was a big collector, random in his taste and must have burnt through a fortune,\u201d smiles Imogen. But the earl\u2019s indulgences may prove gold. The artefacts and furnishings including 17th-century Venetian furniture, renaissance portraiture and tapestries provide Watts\u2019s creative director, Fiona Flint, with a seemingly infinite treasure trove of ideas.\u00a0\u201cThere is pattern everywhere, notably in the Pugin scheme in the Gothic Drawing Room but also in embellished textures in wood, stone, wall and lacquer. For me, it is instantly inspirational \u2013 a feast,\u201d says Flint, who is reimagining elements for contemporary taste including a scenic wallpaper featuring a beautiful horse digitally \u201cextracted\u201d from a tapestry in the Staircase Hall.\u00a0Border patterns, dappled with repair threads and intricate\u00a0marquetry work, have also caught her eye.\u00a0The second significant wave of restoration started in the 1990s when Imogen\u2019s parents set about bolstering the castle\u2019s reputation to boost the private-hire business and visitor attendance. \u201cMy father inherited the house and, with my mother, took a big risk to resurrect and rediscover it. But it was her introduction to Bernard Nevill that got things underway. He was an interesting character: a professor of textile design [at the Central School of Art & Design, the Royal College of Art and St Martin\u2019s School of Art] tutoring designers including Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes while designing for Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Balmain. Essentially, he was a complete contrarian and he loved unlovable things! The scenes in Uncle Monty\u2019s London house in Withnail and I were filmed at his house,\u201d says Imogen.\u00a0Given free rein, Nevill and Imogen\u2019s mother would head to country sales and Lots Road Auctions, buying tapestries and commissioning giant mirrors to transform and enlarge the once spartan Staircase Hall with layered rugs, Venetian dragon benches and a dragon chandelier from the Corsini Palace. \u201cThey wanted every room to feel lived in and really used,\u201d Imogen explains of the overhaul, with new papers and fabrics commissioned (Flint worked on the project) and artworks and furniture (many older than the castle itself) rearranged and pulled out of storage. The opulent Dining Room with its gilded ceiling was enlivened with blue curtains and upholstery, the Little Library with a Watts strapwork linen wall covering that is also being reprised.Imogen, as the next-generation ch\u00e2telaine, is determined to breathe new life into Eastnor. The decorative partnership is one tranche of a rebrand that will also see a dragon replacing a deer in the heraldic logo and a series of cultural salons and events being staged at the castle. Her father, James, meanwhile, continues to run the privately owned castle and estate with operations in tourism, entertainment, hospitality and real estate as well as forestry and farming.\u00a0There is also a steady income from Land Rover that runs off-road driving experiences on the Estate. Indeed, you can order a new Defender in the colourway Eastnor Green. Revenue from events and location hire is less predictable, explains Imogen. In the preservation and future proofing of castles, a bold imagination is required. With the Watts 1874-Eastnor offering, one might find oneself dining out on the other side of the world pleasantly discombobulated by a large swath of the castle\u2019s decorative history.\u00a0eastnorcastle.com, watts1874.co.uk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Looks can be deceptive. From the outside, Herefordshire\u2019s Eastnor Castle, designed by architect Robert\u00a0Smirke in a Norman revival style, is imposing \u2013 brutal even \u2013 all\u00a04,000 tonnes of stone and turrets. Yet on the inside is a mind-boggling m\u00e9lange of gothic, Italian renaissance and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":153189,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-153188","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153190,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153188\/revisions\/153190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}