Haddon Hall is an unusually fortunate house. For centuries its gentle towers and crenellations have lain loosely spread across a limestone outcrop above the River Wye in Derbyshire, like a stony crown on a green cushion. Thanks to a mix of happy accident and the constant care of a single family, its walls have never been battered by cannon fire, nor its rooms scarred by flame, flood or neglect. Home since the 12th century to the dukes of Rutland, it escaped being remodelled when the family moved into their more recently acquired home, Belvoir Castle, which had been rebuilt after the Civil War.
Successive dukes maintained Haddon while living elsewhere, leaving the 14th-century table on its dais in the Banqueting Hall, and the tapestry hanging behind it, a present from Henry VIII. The Long Gallery’s glittering bombé glazing was never replaced with larger panes, and the kitchen remained resolutely Medieval, with not so much as a Georgian turn-spit.
After World War I, the Ninth Duke of Rutland, with huge foresight and sensitivity, began a programme of restoration, during which rare 15th-century wall paintings were discovered under whitewash in the chapel. Haddon was made habitable once more; the duke installed electricity and piped water from a spring in the hills above the house to a reservoir, and from there to a tank in its tallest tower. He built a tennis court and kitchens in the stable block, which he linked to the main house with a miniature underground railway line. He resisted central heating, recognising that hot radiators would desiccate and damage the fabric of the house. He even managed to prevent it from being used as barracks during World War II by offering it as storage for the Public Records Office. And so Haddon’s luck persisted.
The house became a much-loved summer residence, if still too uncomfortably cold for winter months. When the ninth duke died and his son Charles inherited, a bold decision was made to separate the two estates. Belvoir was left to David, 11th Duke of Rutland, and Haddon to his younger brother, Lord Edward Manners. In 2016 Edward, his wife Gabrielle, their three-year-old twin sons and three dogs moved in and made it their home. And perhaps this is the greatest good fortune of all for a house that hadn’t been occupied full-time since the 17th century.
While ‘the donkey work’ had already been done by Edward’s grandfather, the transition from the India Mahdavi-decorated comforts of Bowling Green farmhouse, their home in the grounds, to the hall’s bewildering ramble of stairs and too many rooms to count – some huge, a few stuffed full with stored possessions, most with their Medieval and Tudor interiors intact – was ‘intimidating and overwhelming’, says Gabrielle. ‘We were fast running out of space, but the catalyst was a visit from my American godmother, who asked if she could stay for three weeks. We had no suitable guest-room so decided to decamp to Haddon with suitcases and heaters. Once we were there, it felt right, and so lovely that we never left.’
Edward was already busy continuing his grandfather’s work by ‘de-fielding’ the estate and re-establishing the rich wildlife habitat it provided in the Middle Ages. Gabrielle came to the house with an energy that emanates even over the phone, plus the can-do courage and nous of an entrepreneur who had already built and sold her own lingerie company. ‘First and most importantly we had to make this ancient, inconvenient, utterly beautiful place into a home,’ she says. ‘The 200 hundred years of cold was hard to get used to – I wore a ski-suit indoors – but as we found rooms where we could make cosy nests, and started using and enjoying the spaces, the house came alive. The Long Gallery is fabulous for toddlers to practise running, and we’ve had disco balls and lasers in the Great Hall for parties.’
In re-inhabiting the house, she and Edward have made some important discoveries about its contents, too. ‘There was a wonderful moment when I got an urgent message from a visitor to remove a geranium pot that was on a pewter plate. It turns out Haddon has one of the most important collections of early pewter in the world – we kept finding more bits of it,’ she says. ‘Then there was a room full of picture frames and we realised that each duke had his own pattern and have been reuniting pictures with their original frames ever since. There was also a huge, immensely heavy chest of fabrics from the 1930s that Debo’s [Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire] former butler from Chatsworth helped me sort.’
While honouring the history of the house – they still have no central heating, just electric stoves in bedroom fireplaces, an Aga in their first-floor kitchen and real fires elsewhere – Gabrielle and Edward are not afraid to import dashes of modernity, for example in the ‘ping-pong room’ (named after its previous incarnation as a site for table-tennis tournaments), where they gather with friends on B&B Italia sofas overlooked by a large Desirée Dolron photograph. But they have kept the 1920s bathrooms, with tubs large enough for four children at once, and their kitchen retains its linoleum and Formica.
Gabrielle is undoubtedly a romantic, preferring to serve dinner by candlelight, and remains enchanted by the ‘magic’ of inhabiting what the author Simon Jenkins once called ‘the most perfect house to survive from the Middle Ages’. ‘Sharing it with other people is part of the joy,’ she says. All the principal rooms, and many smaller ones, are open to the public, with the family living predominantly in the west elevation of the hall. ‘I want visitors to be able to wander and sit on chairs – someone fell asleep in one not so long ago,’ she adds. Special events for children are held at Halloween, when the house is transformed into an alternative Hogwarts, and an artisan market at Christmas, when the twinkle of fairy lights intensifies the Elizabethan sparkle of the Long Gallery windows. ‘It’s still cold,’ says Gabrielle. ‘But I don’t feel it like I used to. We have warmed up the house just by living in it and loving it’.
Haddon Hall, Bakewell, Derbys, DE45 1LA. For opening times, visit haddonhall.co.uk
A version of this article originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of The World of Interiors. Never miss an issue by subscribing
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