Not since the Windsor Castle fire has there been a makeover of one of our national treasures on such a scale. Indeed, the restoration of Chatsworth House has cost only a few million pounds less than the £37 million lavished on the castle.
However, the facelift of Chatsworth, in Derbyshire — where Keira Knightley’s heart as Miss Bennet first fluttered over the brooding Mr Darcy in the big-screen version of Pride And Prejudice — was prompted not by adversity but because its owner, the Duke of Devonshire, had no wifi.
That became the trigger for the biggest, costliest and longest refurbishment of his family seat, garden and surrounding parkland for almost 200 years.
Not since the Windsor Castle fire has there been a makeover of one of our national treasures on such a scale. Indeed, the restoration of Chatsworth House (pictured) has cost only a few million pounds less than the £37 million lavished on the castle
And this week, as the last of the scaffolding came down, the Daily Mail was given an exclusive preview of the results of the ten-year, £32.7 million programme that has seen Chatsworth’s blackened sandstone facade meticulously cleaned and restored to a honey glow, and the finials — decorative ornaments — on the roof coated in dazzling gold leaf.
Windows once encrusted with the filth of centuries of pollution glisten from the gold applied to the glazing bars, as I saw for myself when I visited this week.
No wonder the Duke remarked in the early days of the restoration: ‘When it is finished it will be very vulgar but very historically correct.’ And that suits His Grace well. He has even taken to using the word ‘bling’ after hearing that was how the staff were referring to Chatsworth’s spruced-up look.
There have been other colourful remarks about the project, too, from the man who raised eyebrows when he said he would give up his title if Labour won the 2010 general election, while also declaring that the aristocracy was ‘dead’.
The family motto, Cavendo Tutus (‘Safe through caution’) gleams once more in stonework
After finding out dentistry tools were being used for some of the intricate re-pointing work, Peregrine Cavendish, the 12th Duke of Devonshire — known as Stoker — likened the unseen work of re-plumbing and fireproofing to a visit to the dentist. ‘Very painful, very expensive and it doesn’t show,’ he quipped.
So where was the money spent? Well, it has taken 192 tons of lead, plus 2,165 tons of stone from a nearby quarry, 1,500 sheets of gold leaf for each window frame on the west and south terraces, and a further 2,175 sheets for the finials of the east terrace alone.
Elsewhere, 397 windows have been restored and 7,873 panes of glass cleaned, while inside 4,000ft of fabric was ordered to repair curtains in the Sketch galleries.
The sheer ambition of what the Duke labelled ‘the master plan’ cannot be told in statistics alone. Unlike Windsor Castle, which after the fire of 1992 was closed for five years, Chatsworth, which welcomes more than 600,000 visitors a year, observed its normal season and opening hours.
Flying duchess: A renovated portrait of Georgiana, wife of the 5th Duke and ancestor of Princess Diana
Country houses have long had to find innovative ways to safeguard their future. At Longleat, the Marquess of Bath opened a safari park. So, too, did the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, while the car-mad Lord Montagu established a motor museum at Beaulieu.
But Chatsworth has led the way in turning itself into a leading tourist attraction. The baroque pile has an idyllic setting by the River Derwent in the Derbyshire Peak District National Park, surrounded by 1,000 acres of parkland dotted with sheep, fallow deer, cattle and the occasional folly.
Painstaking: Restorers apply gold leaf to balcony railings
Indeed, it was the fate of one of the ornamental buildings in the park — the Game Larder, which was found to be slipping off its foundations — that led the Duke to upgrade his plans from some modest refurbishment (and that wifi) to a full restoration programme.
A full structural survey revealed that outdated water tanks in the attic left the house exposed to the risk of flooding, and the potential for a disastrous fire was extreme.
It was the Duke’s late mother Deborah, youngest of the famous Mitford sisters, who was instrumental in transforming Chatsworth from a private home to a visitor attraction in the Fifties. The farm shop she opened has regularly been rated best in the country.
And Chatsworth has been a sought-after location for Hollywood. Apart from Pride And Prejudice, it was the backdrop for a horror film, The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins; The Duchess, with Keira Knightley playing Georgiana, wife of the 5th Duke of Devonshire and an ancestor of Princess Diana; and a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre.
But after inheriting the title on the death of his father, Andrew, in 2004, Stoker realised it was more than just the fabric of the house that needed attention. To begin with, there were the effects of three centuries of weather and two centuries of soot, carried from the collieries of South Yorkshire and the steel mills of Sheffield 16 miles away.
‘The surface of the stone was black in many places. It had to be power-washed,’ says one of the curators, Diane Naylor.
Brought back to life in all its glory: After a painstaking restoration, a rare 1630 tapestry is set to go back on display
Where stone was too damaged for repair, the closed Burntwood Quarry, which had originally provided the blocks for the North Wing in the 1820s, was reopened and new sandstone extracted.
Says the Duke: ‘It has always been a thrilling moment to see the house come into view as you drive across the park, and now that view is even more magical.’ The top storey of the North Wing had to be completely rebuilt, which alone took 14 months.
Over the past decade the house has provided work for about 100 artisans, from masons and joiners to lead workers and electricians.
‘The last time I counted, when I did the “visitor route”, we had 1,700 individual light bulbs. But that’s only the visitor route,’ says electrician Chris Robinson. ‘In the rest of the house there’s probably three times as many in all the passages, hidden alcoves and private rooms.’
Transformed: Chatsworth hidden by scaffolding. The cost of the repairs has been met by a trust set up by the 11th Duke to preserve the house and its collection
The task of renovating the vast Renaissance tapestries in the State Apartment was no less challenging. Worn by decades of light, moth damage and ‘Derbyshire dirt’, they have been brought back to their 17th-century splendour by conservationists.
When they were removed from the walls, staff were baffled to find sweet wrappers stuffed behind them. No one could work out how or when they were put there. It was only when Susie Stokoe, head of textiles, sent the wrappers to Cadbury for identification that the mystery was solved.
Experts at the chocolate manufacturer dated them to the Forties — when the house was occupied by the girls of Penrhos College, a boarding school evacuated to Chatsworth during World War II. The state apartments were the girls’ dormitories.
The cost of the repairs has been met by a trust set up by the 11th Duke to preserve the house and its collection. Specifically, it is the entrance money paid by more than 25 million visitors since 1949 that has funded the restoration.
Now you see her: A statue of Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, on the roof, covered in ‘Derbyshire dirt’ and glowing clean again
The joy of Chatsworth is the absence of velvet ropes and ‘do not touch’ signs in the public spaces, although some teasels — plants with prickly heads and spiky leaves — have been artfully arranged to discourage anyone wanting to sit on the furniture.
All over the house, historic treasures merge with contemporary pieces: the Duke and Duchess are keen collectors of modern art and contemporary craft.
Recently, they appointed a radical feminist, Linder Sterling, as their first artist-in-residence, and her pieces now sit alongside others by Lucian Freud and various Old Masters.
The last time the ‘Palace of the Peaks’ looked this spectacular was when King George IV was on the throne in the early 1800s — and, with luck, it will be another 100 years before work on such a scale is needed again.
Chatsworth reopens on March 24.