“It is Walt Disney meets Buckingham Palace,” says Lady Kate Barnard in the spectacularly showy Octagon drawing room of Raby Castle. “Barbie would love it.”
You get a sense Barnard is not such a fan. “It would have been so beautiful,” she sighs. “It would have been a round room and unfortunately when [the Victorian architect William] Burn came in 1840 he did … this. It was the height of good taste then.”
Barnard is leading the Guardian on a tour of the family’s medieval castle in County Durham to shine a light on one of the UK’s most ambitious stately home projects of recent years.
The project has been titled “the rising”, after one of the most famous historical events associated with Raby – the Rising of the North, an unsuccessful 1569 attempt by Catholic nobles to depose Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.
Today’s rising is less about politics and religion and more about shopping and eating.
The idea is to create a visitor destination unlike any other, converting unused buildings across 10 hectares (25 acres) of the estate into places for dining, hospitality and retail.
A 200-cover restaurant called the Vinery will be in a modern recreation of the Victorian glasshouse that was once there; events spaces are being created in the castle’s 18th-century riding school and a previously hidden Dutch barn; and the walled gardens are being extensively reimagined and remodelled by the Italian designer Luciano Giubbilei in partnership with Barnard.
It is a huge undertaking, privately funded by the castle’s owners, Lord and Lady Barnard, and is unique, says Claire Jones, the castle’s head of leisure and tourism.
“There is no template. There are little nuggets everywhere you go, we’ve seen some fantastic things … but there is nowhere which is delivering what we’ve got in our minds.”
The main event for most, however, will remain the castle itself and High Force, one of the most spectacular waterfalls in England, further north-west on the Raby Estates.
Inside the castle is a private art collection that includes works by Giordano, Van Dyke, Joshua Reynolds and a painting by Barker of Bath of a woodsman that was one of the most frequently reproduced Christmas images of the 19th century.
There is also incredible furniture and ceramics, including five large porcelain birds, part of a menagerie commissioned from Meissen by Augustus the Strong in the 18th century.
There is lots in the castle that is known about and even more that is not.
The castle’s curator, Julie Biddlecombe-Brown, is three years into an audit that will probably take 20 years, and regularly gets an “adrenaline rush” when she makes a new discovery.
In June she came across a ducal coronet on a top shelf that had been used at the coronation of Queen Victoria and forgotten about. “It looks brand, spanking new, like it’s never been touched,” says Barnard.
Biddlecombe-Brown is slowly adding and investigating more treasures. “There are about 4,500 items now on our database whereas we didn’t even have a database before,” she says.
Raby Castle is already known to film and television makers with it being used in productions including Sam Mendes’s 1917, the Sky drama Britannia, ITV’s Victoria and the US drama Billions.
The Rising project is partly motivated by the changing demands of visitors. People do go to castles and stately homes for the stories and the history but they want more, Jones says. They want good food and brilliant shopping, not just the stuff you can find in every garden centre, she adds.
But it is also about sustainability and ensuring Raby Castle survives for future generations.
The castle, in Teesdale, is also part of a bigger tourism picture. It is near the market town of Barnard Castle, which is still getting a positive boost from the Dominic Cummings scandal.
English Heritage last year said the actual Barnard Castle, a crumbling medieval fortress, received a record number of visitors because of its notoriety as the destination of Boris Johnson’s former adviser’s lockdown mission to test his eyesight. People still regularly stop to take a photograph at the town’s welcome sign.
Nearby, Bishop Auckland is going through a cultural renaissance with the Auckland project, which includes the new Faith Museum and a “Prado of the north” Spanish art gallery.
At the moment the grounds of Raby Castle resemble a very muddy building site. By the spring of 2024 it will, its supporters say, be transformed.
“It is an ambitious project that we are hugely excited about launching to visitors who already know and love Raby, as well as new visitors,” says Barnard. “We genuinely feel Raby now has something for everyone.”
• This article was amended on 8 January 2024 to clarify that High Force is on the Raby Estates, not in the grounds of Raby Castle itself.
