Touring A 900-Year-Old Manor: Frozen in Time, but Warmed Up for 21st-Century Living | Visitors’ Book

Haddon Hall is 900 years old. It's nestled into the landscape, you can almost hardly see Haddon. It's burrowed into the trees and hugs the hill. It feels like a living organism. It feels like it's got a sort of energy and beating heart. Haddon is my home. We are its guardians and it's where my heart is. It reflects onto you. The more I give Haddon, the more it gives me. I am Lady Edward Manus and I live with my husband in his family's ancestral home in the heart of the Peak District. With our two beautiful children and our two beloved dogs. This house wasn't used as a family house. We lived in a different house further up the hill. My first sights of Haddon was when actually we walked across the hills and then came down from the River Wye and approached the house from the gardens. At that point the house was completely asleep. I definitely think when I first arrived I was a bit intimidated by the reality of what would be involved largely because it was so not used. It was a big family home until Queen Anne's reign. So the house was full of life, 300 people were living in it. It was a place of entertainment and then what happened after that was they left it for at least 200 years. Until the 9th Duke of Rutland, my husband's grandfather, decided to revise or bring the house back to life. And then the family used it for shooting weekends etc and it wasn't formally lived in by anyone as a family until we entered which was almost 100 years later. When I came in there were these enormous, magnificent, beautiful, frozen in time rooms which were in great shape. I was wearing my ski clothes because it was so cold and went into things like chest of drawers. Some of them hadn't been opened for 100 years, you didn't know what you were going to find. So you'd open a drawer and then there'd be maybe old photos, but wonderful old photos. And you open another drawer and then you find like a skull. So you shut that door really quickly, shut the drawer. You're constricted by the elements of the past, you can't change walls, you can't change space. So you have to work out how you're going to fit with the structure of the past and they lived a very different life to us. So you kind of fit in. You just want to build a happy home. When you arrive at a house like this, it has this very special ancient essence that sits in it. And I think it's really dangerous to override that. I didn't want to superimpose us into the house so much that it lost its soul. I made sure that I tried to keep as many of the original pieces of furniture in the rooms that were there before. The ping pong room was the most important room in my mind to recreate or bring life to. And it was also, I would say, the only room at Haddon that had a kind of uncomfortable feeling to it. It was very bleak, it was very dark. I opened up the fireplace, put in the log burner, started warming up the room. The dog in the frame is a picture that I found covered in soot and ash. A restorer just took off this first layer of it and out came this beautiful lurcher. The two beautiful leather chairs were originally bought for Edward's parents, the 10th Duke and Duchess of Rutland, for their London house. And they were put into the London house by David Hicks. A very dear friend of ours, Billy Amberg, reupholstered them. And they're still in use and they're very comfortable. And they look fabulous. Some of the rooms in the house that we've just not had to touch at all are the bathrooms. I mean, the 9th Duke did the most incredible jobs with the bathrooms. He put in these magnificent enameled roll-top baths. We've left them completely as they were. We just gave them a bit of a lick of paint. And the looves are the magnificent, you know, crank up the loo. Some of our guests don't know what to do on the loo with the crank, but they work. Really important to understand that Haddon that it's open to the public, but actually it's a home. We had to put sofas into the banqueting hall because when the public go, we often go and sit on the beautiful Indian Madhavi sofas with the blue designed just to pick out the colour of the tapestry that sits behind the dais table, which was given to the family by Henry VIII. The minstrel's gallery, whenever we have a party, that's where you put the DJ. Part of the fun of Haddon is getting into all the little rooms and making them all have a function. So we needed a bar. And so it was decided that the bar would go in the original buttery. The bar is painted red from the Aziz Bifid expression, paint the town red, and is named after one of my husband's ancestors. The mark was a Gramby, who was the first person to set up pensions for soldiers. So lots of pubs are named after him. The bar itself was the original train that they used to use to bring the food up from the stable block to the medieval kitchens. And I looked at it and I thought, what a perfect bar. The Great Chamber is my dream summer sitting room because the light, there's this enormous spectacular window at the end. I'm playing with it at the moment. And quite controversially, I put in a Zahra Hadid sofa. And I'm just trying to see or work out whether putting such strikingly modern pieces of furniture into such a nice space. I love it. That's the way I would do it. I'm just wondering what the public will think. The end of my life. I really hope that my family, my husband and I will look back on it and say, well, we were good custodians. We've been able to pass this house on in a better condition. We've done so much more. We've protected what was needed to do in our century. And our children can take it on forward from then.