A roaring fire was waiting for us, the flames hungrily licking the wood with a satisfying crackle. The sun had just set on a day of icy winter sunshine, the old castle now illuminated and framed by the sitting room’s Gothic-style arched windows.
We had arrived for a weekend at The West End, a generous hunk of Hawarden Castle in North Wales. Once the Flintshire home of the 19th century prime minister William Gladstone, its western wing has been recast as a holiday house by its current custodians, Charlie and Caroline Gladstone. Alongside various of their six grown-up children, it is just one of many ways in which the couple is opening up the estate. And in their signature joyful fashion, a stuffy castle apartment this is not. Its handsome bones have been emboldened by a maximalist riot of colour — hot pinks and spearmint greens — while each wall is an art gallery within itself with more than 100 original works, including Hirsts and Shrigleys, hung across its five bedrooms and living spaces.
“My parents have done a brilliant job of bringing it into the modern day, without modernising it,” says Tara Richards-Gladstone, their third eldest, who has been working full time for Hawarden since 2020. Her mother, who used to work for Laura Ashley, is in charge of colour; while her father is the visionary behind the West End’s playful design and curation — a natural continuation of the family’s own home on the other side of the wall. A self-described ‘enthusiast’, Charlie trawled auctions and vintage markets to create a magpie’s mish-mash of objects and curiosities, as well as drawing on family favourites to select the stack of vinyl for guests to play. “We are all collectors,” smiles Tara. “We all like beautiful things, even if they don’t have a purpose.”
During our December stay we had the run of the estate, thrilled by the freedom and fun that it offers. We walked to the Glynne Arms, the Gladstones’ cosy pub in the village, for venison Wellington by the fire, before heading upstairs for the gentle live set of Liverpudlian folk duo, Loris and the Lion. We crunched our way through morning frost up to the old castle’s 13th century ruins — which you can abseil down —for some posture-correcting stretching, a hint of the winter wellness programme coming to Hawarden in January.
Afterwards, we thawed out by an open fire — a Gladstone family obsession — and refuelled with cottage pie in the Walled Garden School. Run by Tara, it hosts everything from al fresco cookery workshops to Summer Camp, their family-friendly micro-festivals.
We romped around the park to the Farm Shop, where we filled up on estate-made goodies and which was humming with festive life on a Saturday afternoon: families roasting marshmallows over (more) fire pits and a choir singing carols. We drank hot buttered rum on the deck of the frozen lake, surrounded by woodland and cosseted by butterfly chairs coated in thick Welsh blankets, before hotfooting it back to the house to bake ourselves in the West End’s private sauna.
One part of the castle kept under lock and key is the Temple of Peace, the private library of William Gladstone. Private tours can be arranged of this fascinating space, which sits directly under the West End and is just as the four times prime minister left it, a store of new stationery wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string still waiting to be opened. A great liberal mind and passionate advocate of good conversation, it feels fitting that Gladstone’s descendants are reinvigorating Hawarden in a way that ignites so much chatter. There are no televisions in The West End, encouraging you to give into more wholesome pursuits such as cooking together, playing board games or listening to records — and more often than not, in close proximity to a fire. A voracious reader who is said to have read a book a day in his later years, Gladstone would no doubt approve of the hundreds of titles strewn across every available surface too.
Inevitably, coming from a family that loves a party, The West End is also ripe for celebrations, whether you need to entertain multiple generations of your own brood or a gaggle of friends. “I can just imagine dinners going on for hours at the long table in the West Room,” says Tara “and those weekends where you laugh the whole time.”
We enjoyed one such dinner on our final night cooked by Xanthe Ross, another Gladstone daughter, who has her own supperclub business in London. After hot toddies in the apartment’s private woodland, we feasted on sausages from Glen Dye (their sister estate in Scotland), a seriously good apple and blackberry pie and, as intended, chewed the fat well into the night.
On a rainy Monday morning, we left Hawarden reluctantly just before dawn. Feeling happy and full. And scented, of course, by woodsmoke.
Three Welsh houses to rent with a group
1. Little Mill at Abergavenny
2. Botanist’s House, Hay
3. Charity, Black Mountains
