An Englishwoman’s home is her castle

An imposing castle that has been in the same family for 200 years, and was featured as the location for Shiv and Tom’s wedding in Succession, is well worth a visit. And now you can hire this very big house in the country for your own discerning yet hedonistic fun

“What is luxury now,” asks Imogen Hervey-Bathurst, scraping her raven hair from her pale face and ruby-red lips. “It’s authenticity, it’s soul, it’s comfort, combined with bacchanalian, opulent drama in a historic family home,” she continues, with a naughty flash. “Eastnor is, glamorous, it’s grand, it’s relaxed. We want people to have fun here whatever they are doing…”

She notes that Sammy Davis Jr of the Rat Pack rode a horse here, and that Harvey Keitel was the house’s first paying guest. Other guests have included Queen Mary, and Madonna, who stayed here while directing W.E., her flick about Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. The place has celluloid, celebrity, history, and aristocracy creds, and to top all this, even the Eastnor wallpapers and furnishings, can be yours, too. For a price, and up to a point.

Yes, you can rent the stately home that – here’s the showstopper – no less than Shiv Roy and Tom Wambsgans got married in (in fact, the cast and crew of Succession all stayed here for six weeks).

You can also party in sumptuous rooms decorated by British designer, collector and consummate aesthete Bernard Nevill. You can drink from the cellar which has been curated with wine experts Hedonism, eat dishes prepared by chefs who have cooked for royalty, and drive, as I did, high-spec Land Rovers all over the vast estate that has lent its name for those who want their vehicle in eponymous Eastnor Green livery.

It looks like a fortified castle from Game of Thrones, with a keep and watchtowers – so many turrets it could give you Tourette’s. It glowers over a large lake at the foot of the Malvern Hills. The exterior is by Smirke, the architect of the British Museum, the interiors include a drawing room by Pugin, who decorated the Palace of Westminster, as well as an Italianate library and billiard room which, with their rich Renaissance furnishings give the house a surprisingly un-English feel. There is a deer park and an arboretum. Park by the porte cochère, where shallow steps take you into a 60ft-high mock Gothic entrance hall (Pugin was furious when he discovered the castle was Regency, not medieval) hung with old masters and shiny silver coats of armor, where two fires blaze (most rooms at Eastnor have two fireplaces as they are so enormous).

Welcome to Eastnor Castle 2026, on the Herefordshire border, brutal, and stony on the outside, soft and welcoming on the inside. It looms Janus-like over both Wales and the Cotswolds, and is undergoing another renaissance under Imogen Hervey-Bathurst, who co-directs operations along with her father, James, and his wife, Lucy.

The HB team is providing a fresh new template for the English country house: there is fun, fashion, and food on top of the antiques and history and aristocracy you would expect from a castle that has been in the same family since it was built. And now, for 2026, they have worked on a unique collaboration with a furnishings and fabric house almost as storied as Eastnor itself.

Watts 1874 has painstakingly mapped and photographed the interiors with geometric calibration cameras, to replicate the sumptuous textures of Eastnor. As there is no archive, and wallpapers are glued to the walls, snatches and sections of patterns and designs and details are meticulously taken from the rooms. Not just curtains and wallpaper, but sections of the coffered ceiling in the dining room, for example, have been turned using 3D technology into trompe-l’oeil 2D wallpapers. Watts 1874 has magicked 17th-century mythological seascape tapestries in the Long Library (originally sourced from a palazzo in Mantua) into murals, and a Trastámara painted leather screen in the Great Hall has been translated into both papers and fabrics.

“We don’t do little flowers – we are all about scale, historically designing for huge properties and churches – and, my God, does Eastnor have scale!” Marie-Séverine de Caraman Chimay, managing director of Watts 1874, and a descendant of Giles Gilbert Scott, told the Financial Times. She’s in the business of heritage too, which makes this collab a marriage made in heaven.

A mash-up of Hogwarts, Uncle Monty’s cottage, and Arabian Nights, the castle provides a bottomless source of inspiration; there are unexpected treasures at every turn. Eastnor’s romanticism derives from Imogen’s ancestor, the 3rd Earl Somers and his Anglo-Indian wife, Virginia. They were peripatetic, bohemian, with friends including Julia Margaret Cameron, William Thackeray, and artist George Frederic Watts – and boy, they loved to shop.

“He was a big collector, random in his taste and must have burned through a fortune,” says Imogen. But the 3rd Earl’s habit proved an incalculable boon. His furniture, artifacts, and furnishings – including 17th-century Venetian furniture and Renaissance portraiture and tapestries – provide Watts with infinite inspiration when it comes to producing papers and fabrics for clients who want a piece of the Eastnor magic for themselves… even if they can’t match the scale.

We are taking tea in the Great Hall, which – despite armor adorning the walls and 60-foot ceilings – somehow feels cozy. Imogen credits British textile designer and academic Bernard Nevill for this.

“Regeneration began in the 1990s with my parents, and helped by Bernard Nevill, a professor of textiles at London College of Fashion,” she reveals (Nevill was a fabric designer for Saint Laurent and Balmain). “He loved unlovable things, and the scenes at Uncle Monty’s house in Withnail and I were filmed at his house in Glebe Place.”

Ashlar-hewn Eastnor is so monumental it looks like it would outlast the crack of doom, but Imo’s grandmother had considered blowing it up in the 1960s. This was the fashion then, with expensive country houses regularly reduced to rubble. Imogen explains that luckily, after investigation, “my grandmother concluded it would be too expensive to blow it up.” Pure Evelyn Waugh.

And now her granddaughter is determined to reinvent it for the discerning yet hedonistic traveler, tired of bland quiet luxury – or, put another way, for the post-Saltburn generation, who want to have fun in a very big house in the country. So yes, you can hire Eastnor. “Staying in an authentic and beautiful family home on a real estate is a money-can’t-buy experience. Rather than being grand, Eastnor is eclectic, unexpected, and fun,” Imo Hervey-Bathurst promises.

“And warm!”