A ghostly bearded face peers out from the wall of a bedroom, flanked by a pair of winged, snake-like beasts baring their teeth, their necks chained to an ermine roundel. The pattern repeats around the room like psychedelic wallpaper, featuring slithery creatures with long curling tongues, a jester in a horned cap, and mysterious figures with clownish faces and barrels for bodies, all crowned with a frieze of white Yorkshire roses.
This trippy scene, in Calverley Old Hall in West Yorkshire, is one of the most important surviving Tudor wall paintings in the country, thought to date from the 1550s, when it was likely inspired by decorations recently discovered in Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea villa in Rome. It had been lost for centuries, hidden behind the floral wallpaper of a cottage bedroom.
“We had no inkling we would discover an Elizabethan painted chamber here,” says Anna Keay, director of the Landmark Trust, the charity that has brought this rambling Yorkshire pile back to life with a seven-year, £5m restoration. “It looked like any other upstairs bedroom in a Victorian terrace.”
A small hole was made in the bedroom’s lath and plaster wall during routine restoration work, through which shining a torch revealed something odd. “I was sceptical at first,” says Keay. “We were squinting at photos of a white splodge.” Thankfully, her colleagues persisted, removed more of the plaster wall, and made the remarkable discovery. You can now sleep in this astonishing Tudor chamber, protected by the swirling mythical beasts, for as little as £35 per person per night, now the stately complex has been reborn as a holiday let.
The transformation of Calverley Old Hall is the most ambitious project the Landmark Trust has undertaken to date, by some stretch. Founded in 1965 to save buildings at risk, the charity now has more than 200 properties on its books, from a pineapple-shaped folly in Scotland to a modernist house in Devon, and it is currently transforming the concrete box of a second world war airfield office into its latest unlikely holiday home.
The Calverley warren is one of the most intriguing of the lot: a multilayered, almost millennium-long physical timeline of a noble family’s rise and calamitous fall, now back with a contemporary twist. It is a story of knights and ladies, cloth workers and a milkman, featuring battles and imprisonments, chivalric deeds and shady dealings, rash marriages and gruesome murders – eight colourful centuries that guests can digest during their stay, thanks to a detailed history album (the first Landmark folder to stretch to three volumes – conservation nerds can rejoice).
The labyrinthine place began with a 1300s hall, which was expanded in the 1400s with a majestic banqueting hall, then joined by a parlour block and private chapel in the 1500s – added by Sir William Calverley, likely owner of the bearded visage. By the 1600s, the family’s fortunes were in decline. Crippled by fines, as devoted Catholics in a now Protestant country, they were forced to sell. The manor was chopped up into cottages in the 1700s, and continually altered and adapted, becoming the rambling home to generations of weavers, farmers and stonemasons.
From the outside today, it’s hard to tell if it’s still a row of houses, a repurposed church, or a former coaching inn. It stands as a higgledy-piggledy mishmash of conjoined bits, hemmed in by suburban houses. Nothing prepares you for the grandeur of what awaits inside, nor how it has been reimagined. “We didn’t want to take it back to one particular era,” says Karen Lim of Cowper Griffith, the Cambridge-based architects who won an open competition to transform the place in 2017. “It was about allowing the building’s many histories to speak.”
Their work here is beautifully judged, combining judicious demolition and surgical intervention with crisp new oak joinery and hand-beaten ironmongery, allowing every chapter of the building’s saga to sing. An elegant timber staircase greets you as you enter, cleverly designed in the manner of a stone stair. Slender wooden balusters rise to form a screen along one side of the hallway. Look closely and you’ll see the balusters are profiled on one side, but flat on the other – a nod to the medieval oak spere truss that sails overhead.
“They would have only decorated the side facing the ‘high end’ of the hall,” explains Landmark’s historian, Caroline Stanford, “where the lord of the manor would have sat on a raised dais.” So the balusters are flat on the “service” side, where milord would not have deigned to tread.
When you’re playing lord of the five-bedroom manor for the weekend, you have access all areas – though you might need a map to find your way around. The star turn is the great hall, once divided into a row of weavers’ cottages, now revealed in all its triple-height glory. It was built in the 1480s, with a gargantuan arched fireplace beneath a mighty hammer-beam roof, richly carved in the latest fashion of the day.
The rugged stone walls, now limewashed, bear the scars of centuries of use, with rows of holes where former floor joists were fixed, and fireplaces floating halfway up the walls, dating from the cottage era. A wheelchair lift, discretely housed in its own timber-panelled tower, adds a contemporary layer, as does the underfloor, ground-source heating throughout. The east end, where the open kitchen is arranged, has been smartly framed with new oak panelling, hiding services and insulation, with deeply set windows that can be closed off with folding shutters and sliding panels, forming modern-day priest holes – making great spots for hide and seek.
The children of the manor might have wished such hidey-holes existed in 1605, when their father, Walter Calverley, went on the rampage. Overwhelmed by debt and doubting his wife’s faithfulness, he murdered his two small sons, William and Walter, and was later executed in York by being pressed to death beneath heavy stones. The sorry tale was immortalised in A Yorkshire Tragedy, a Jacobean play originally credited to Shakespeare, but now believed to be by Thomas Middleton.
A touch of Shakespearean drama does feature in the first floor landing, which looks down into the great hall from a pair of Juliet balconies, on either side of a retained 17th-century wall. It leads through to the oldest part of the building, the former “solar”, or living quarters, which now makes a cosy living room, where a fragment of wattle and daub can still be found in one corner. Open what looks like an innocuous cupboard door, and you find yourself, Narnia-like, thrust into the private gallery level of a chapel, where the Calverleys would have observed mass from behind a regal screen. More recently, it’s where one former cottage resident, Mrs Bartle, used to have her bath.
A curious range of objects found during the restoration are on display in the chapel downstairs, from children’s shoes to hens’ eggs, thought to have been secreted into the walls as good luck charms. The space is open to the public on selected Mondays and Fridays, while the former 16th-century lodging block around the back has been converted into a hireable community room with a public garden (a feature required by the £1.75m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund) and a tenanted flat.
Going beyond the engagement requirements of the grant, the project was a truly collaborative process, almost medieval in its collective nature, seeing numerous trainee and apprentice craftspeople employed, with more than 3,000 people involved along the way. Public workshops were also held in everything from joinery to lime plastering, weaving, curtain printing, and even Minecraft sessions for kids.
It had been a long time coming for the area. Landmark originally acquired the site in the 1980s, when it was home to eight tenanted cottages, some already rundown. It converted one wing into a holiday let, but struggled to find a purpose for the rest. When the last tenant moved out, the charity finally decided to tackle the whole complex, bolstered by the success of Astley Castle – a ruined 16th-century manor in Warwickshire that it transformed with striking contemporary interventions. It went on to win the 2013 Stirling prize. Both projects demonstrate a bold approach that the custodians of more vacant buildings – whether medieval or modernist – would do well to learn from.
“We’ve got amazing building stock at risk all over the country,” says Keay. “If we can be a bit more imaginative about the joy we can get from their idiosyncrasies, we won’t need so much new-build.”
