The Landmark Trust team stared up at the battered walls of Calverley Old Hall in West Yorkshire. Anna Keay, the charity’s head, had first seen this medieval building four decades after it was acquired, when it was still divided into nine cramped dwellings. Now, the scaffolding was up, and the real work was about to begin. “This little tiny building has been standing derelict for over a century,” Anna said, standing before the derelict dairy at Cobham Hall in Kent, a separate project that had just been rescued with a million pounds of fundraising.
The tiny Georgian gem, designed by the superstar architect James Wyatt for Lady Darnley, was once the domain of the lady herself, who would arrive in fine silks to supervise the dairy maids as they made butter and cheese. John Evitts, the Landmark Trust’s furniture expert, knelt on the ground at Cobham, examining a surviving patch of Wyatt’s original tiling. “It’s brilliant that this one bit does survive, so we can see how it all works,” he said, testing the sandy white color that would help reflect heat away from the building. The painted tiles gave the impression that the whole structure was made of expensive stone.
But the bigger challenge was Calverley Old Hall. Three years ago, the central solar block was a cavernous empty space, its original 30-foot-high ceiling long since hidden by cottage floors inserted in the 18th century. Now, Anna and John stood on the new first-floor level, looking at the room that would become a grand sitting room. “It is amazing seeing it full space now, isn’t it?
” Anna said. John nodded, already planning the interior. “I don’t intend to put very much furniture in, but I’d like to put in bits that have got quite a bit of scale. ”
He had a plan for a massive court cupboard that had just been donated.
“I’ve got a fantastic bit of court cupboard, huge court cupboard that we’ve been given,” he said. Anna laughed. “How the hell are we going to get it up the stairs? ” John shrugged.
“I have no idea. ”
To find inspiration for how the hall might have looked in the Middle Ages, the team traveled 25 miles north to Markenfield Hall, a similar-period house still surrounded by open fields. Standing in its upstairs grand sitting room, buildings archaeologist Jonathan Clark pointed out the similarities. “Just as here at Markenfield, Calverley’s solar also once had a much higher ceiling,” he said.
John’s eyes lit up at a table with books stored underneath. “This is what I proposed to put at the far end of what we call the solar, and yet I’d never actually seen it before,” he admitted. The visit reinforced why the building mattered. “It is actually comparable with Markenfield Hall behind me,” Anna said.
“And its history is just as rich and just as important. ”
Five months later, John was back on site to inspect the new laminated Douglas fir staircase being fitted by Michael Bloom and his team. “It’s a bit of a jigsaw, but it’s good,” Michael said, carefully positioning a tread. John joked, “Eat your heart out, IKEA.
” Michael laughed, replying, “We’ve literally not got any room for error at all. ”
The most delicate work was on the remarkable Tudor wall paintings. Dr. Lizzy Woolley and her team from Opus Conservation were painstakingly cleaning away 500 years of dust and grime.
When Anna first saw them three years ago, the heads of the figures were totally invisible. Now, they had emerged. “It’s been really exciting because some of the things that we knew would work well have indeed worked well,” Lizzy said, carefully brushing a section. The big thrill, she explained, was the discovery of actual depictions of people in contemporary Tudor dress, possibly Sir William Calverley himself and his wife, the very people who commissioned the paintings.
“It’s like a whole other layer of discovery on top of our original one,” she added. With just a week to go before the hall opened to its first guests, John’s team faced the monumental task of moving in the heavy furniture. The special bookcase came up first, requiring the handrail to be taken down. Next came the 15-foot refectory table John had bought from his old school.
“Why on earth do I deal with all this heavy furniture? I must be insane,” he muttered. “Anyway, it looks great, doesn’t it? ”
Then came the big beast: the 17th-century court cupboard weighing nearly a quarter of a ton.
It had to get up the staircase to the first-floor solar. John’s first plan was to slide it up using wooden planks, but the thickness of the planks reduced the available height. “This is what you don’t think about,” he said. “And I think what we’re just going to have to do is take a manly pill and get on with it.
”
The team carefully lifted the massive piece. “This is the step that’s going to tell,” John said. “This is the one. ” They paused at the tightest point.
“Careful. Did anyone check to see if it’s empty? ” someone joked. It wobbled dangerously, then cleared.
“Yay! Easy! ” John shouted. “I don’t know why I had a sleepless night.
I really don’t. ”
“Is this the time to admit that I haven’t measured it? ” he asked, as the cupboard sat perfectly in place. “I think it sits there very happily.
I’m going to put a lamp on the top, give it a bit of a polish, put the cornice on it, and that’s it. Planted. ”
Finally, the big day arrived. After a renovation project lasting more than three years and costing five million pounds, Calverley Old Hall was opening its doors.
Anna walked into the Great Hall, which had once been a demolition site containing the remains of two separate cottages. Now it was a stunning double-height kitchen and dining area. “Here’s the kitchen, or the Great Hall,” she said. “Wow, doesn’t it look brilliant?
And I remember saying, I can just really imagine how great it would be to stand at this spot and to be chopping your onions and to be seeing this amazing medieval roof in front of you. And I haven’t actually got an onion, but I mean it really lives up to it, doesn’t it? ”
The panelled room, once a workshop where old wood panels were being refashioned, was now a smart bedroom. The modern staircase swept up through the central space, leading to the solar sitting room, now a warm and comfortable living area with a library, a sitting area, and a window seat for games.
“I think it’ll be quite a party space,” Anna said. And finally, the unique masterpiece: the painted chamber. The 450-year-old paintings that had been hidden for centuries were now fully revealed. Anna walked in and gasped.
“Look at it. It is a fantastic space. It works brilliantly. I mean this room must be the most different of everywhere, mustn’t it, really, in the whole building.
”
Reflecting on the entire project, Anna thought about how the battle to save the hall had been like peeling back layers of history. “The thing that’s been so wonderful among all the wonderful things about this project has been to bring it all back together again, to reunite all these different spaces, to make them whole again,” she said. “And to take the best of the way that people lived in the Middle Ages, about living together and doing things together, occupying big communal spaces, and to make that part of how this building can work again in the 21st century and into the future with whole new generations of people being able to come here, stay here, cook here, have fun here, enjoy life here once again. And that just feels like such an achievement.
”
