Holker Hall

Holker Hall stands two kilometres south-west of Cartmel in Cumbria, a grand country house built in the 16th century and reshaped in the 18th and 19th centuries. George Webster rebuilt much of it in Jacobean Revival style in the 1830s, while E. G. Paley and Hubert Austin restored the west wing after a fire in 1871. The west wing is recognised as their finest domestic work, and Nikolaus Pevsner called it outstanding. The estate covers eighty hectares of gardens, parkland and woodland, with six listed structures among them. The house has belonged to the Cavendish family since the 18th century, passing through marriage from the Prestons to the Lowthers and then to the Cavendishes. The fire of 1871 destroyed over a hundred works of art, including pieces by Canaletto, Rubens and van Dyck. Paley and Austin rebuilt the wing on the same footprint but on a grander scale, adding two towers in Elizabethan Revival style. The library holds about 3,500 books, some rescued from the fire and some once owned by Henry Cavendish. The billiards room displays panels by Jean-Baptiste Oudry and a caricature by Joshua Reynolds. The drawing room’s silk walls and Carrara marble fireplace frame paintings by Vernet and Rosa. Visitors walk through Paley and Austin’s west wing to reach the library, billiards room, drawing room and dining room, each with richly decorated ceilings. The dining room contains chairs by Thomas Chippendale and portraits by van Dyck. An oak staircase with over a hundred differently carved balusters leads upstairs to a gallery and four bedrooms. Queen Mary’s Bedroom recalls her 1937 stay, while the Wedgwood Bedroom holds a Hepplewhite four-poster bed. Outside, the gardens and parkland offer paths through formal planting and woodland, with a café in the old stables.