Desig House: Real Homes: Holker Hall

Passing down through inheritance for nearly 400 years, Holker Hall has a rich history resulting in an interior that combines comfort with charm. Former House & Garden editor Susan Crewe recounts her childhood set within its walls, her elder brother's tenure and the arrival of her niece as chatelaine of this Cumbrian gem

It is quite unusual for an English country house to have never been bought or sold in 400 years, but Holker Hall has passed down through three families by inheritance - sometimes through women - since 1610. Architecturally the house is pleasing rather than distinguished, but its position, within sight of an estuary on the northern shores of Morecambe Bay and the mountains and fells of the southern Lake District, endow it with surroundings of breathtaking and varied beauty.

Another exceptional thing about Holker - pronounced 'Hooker' to the surprise of American visitors - is how much it has been loved and enjoyed by the successive generations who have lived there. Perhaps I should declare an interest at this point. It is the house in which I was born, grew up and to which I often joyfully return. My father, Richard Cavendish, inherited Holker upon the death of his own father in 1946 - just after the end of the Second World War - but he also inherited colossal debts and an estate depleted by wartime exigencies. He and my mother were young and had small children, and despite being advised to sell the whole thing, they decided to fight for it. Over the next 26 years, they gradually turned its fortunes around. They opened the Victorian wing and the
garden to the public - only the second 'stately home' in England to do so - converted another wing of the house into flats and tried by every means possible to make the various enterprises on the estate productive.

Never a robust man and weakened by rheumatic fever in his youth, tuberculosis and exhaustion, our father died in his early fifties, but he and our mother had put the place on a sound footing and it was the turn of my elder brother Hugh and his wife Grania to move into Holker in 1972 and continue the tradition of improvements, innovation and hospitality. The photographs on these pages are a record of the house during their tenure because, at the beginning of this year, they moved to a renovated collection of farm buildings on the edge of the estuary and handed over the house and the estate to their eldest daughter, Lucy.

Over the centuries, Holker's various owners have altered, enlarged, demolished, refaced and reconfigured the house to such an extent that it is virtually impossible to give a coherent narrative of the building. It is known that there was a dwelling on the site in the fifteenth century and it is probable the current house grew by degrees round an original farmhouse or modest manor. Certainly the oldest part of the house, which is known as the 'brown hall', is a panelled room unlike any other in the house. It has three internal doors and a fourth leading into the garden, which could well have been the original entrance.

These days the entrance to the family's part of the house is the antithesis of a grand front door, rather it is reached by a narrow wrought-iron gate set in a wall and a short passage that isn't far removed from an alley. This is on account of needing to skirt the vast, red sandstone wing that replaced one that burned to the ground in 1871. The Victorian wing is wonderfully self-confident and not in the least bit subtle, with towers, domes, stained-glass windows, and a huge portico and front door. It was also an absolute gift to my parents, who were able to open it to the public in 1949, leaving themselves an earlier and far more manageable part of the house to actually live in.

If it was my parents' role to save and secure Holker, my brother and sister-in-law have
burnished it. Never have two people lived more fully in a house or made it such a welcoming place. The garden at dusk, picnics on the shore, delicious feasts in the dining room, fires in the bedrooms, walks in gentle rain, the smell of polish, the sound of laughter and of dogs' paws on slate - these are the impressions that linger in the minds of the many guests who have stayed in the house over the years.

Indeed, it was a small pack of Grania's lurchers - never less than three - that greeted you in the hall after you'd negotiated the wrought-iron gate in the wall. They bounded about in silent tail-wagging welcome and escorted you down a short flight ofsteps into the brown hall. This is the first in an enfilade of rooms that progresses through the drawing room to the dining room and finally to the most charming garden room or loggia, where many summer meals are enjoyed.

These rooms are pretty, comfortable, unpretentious and full of pictures, books, textiles, interesting objects and flowers. Some of the chintz is a little faded, but that's what happens to chintz when the sun streams in. A house of this size is in a constant process of restoration and renewal; indeed when the Warner fabric of the covers and curtains in the brown hall needed to be replaced, it was found that the original blocks had been destroyed on account of woodworm. Most of us would have settled for something similar, but Grania had the blocks recut and the original fabric recreated. Elsewhere in this room, she has innovated by using a suzani border as an additional frame for an Elizabethan portrait. And so it is throughout the house, respect for tradition coupled with adaptation and invention.

Upstairs the bedrooms give off long, straight corridors with deeply recessed doorways, which used to terrify me as a child - there was no telling what might be lurking within the shadows. However the guest bedrooms themselves are friendly. Canopied beds, dressing tables pristine in stiff, white organza and logs crackling in the fireplace made them quintessentially hospitable. I have no doubt that these rooms will soon be sheltering a new generation of friends because Lucy already has a reputation as an indefatigable and generous host, and I know this much-loved house will thrive alongside its new chatelaine.