Brideshead Revisited, Bridgerton, Gosford Park, Saltburn: the combination of toffs behaving badly on rolling estates has long been catnip for filmmakers.
Votaries of the cult of the outrageous aristocrat can visit Castle Howard, the North Yorkshire pile portrayed in Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton. Drayton, the 127-room jewel in Northamptonshire seen in Saltburn—which for many was the real star of Emerald Fennell’s fever dream, not Barry Keoghan’s penis—remains a private residence. Film fanatics who want to re-create “that scene” (maybe don’t google it) will have to content themselves with those Saltburn bathtub cocktails that are all over TikTok.
But better news. The enormous Schloss that cost a king’s ransom to build back in 1812 and was immortalized as the setting of Shiv and Tom’s wedding in Succession can be yours. (Scream!) For a fee.
As you turn off the highway outside Ledbury, follow the brown signs (which denote a stately home or other attraction) that announce Eastnor. It looks like a fortified castle from Game of Thrones, with a keep, watchtowers, and enough turrets to boggle the mind. It glowers over a large lake that extends to the Malvern Hills. It was designed by Robert Smirke, the architect of the British Museum, and the drawing room’s ornate interiors are by Augustus Pugin, who decorated the Palace of Westminster. There is a pinetum—that’s a garden dedicated to conifers to us common folk—and a deer sanctuary.
Park by the portcullis porch, where shallow steps take guests into a mock-medieval entrance hall that is 60 feet high and hung with old masters and shiny silver coats of armor. Two fires will be blazing, but that’s to be expected at Eastnor, where the rooms are enormous enough to require them.
It can be rented for a weekend getaway, a wedding, or a shooting party. There’s plenty of room to roam around the 5,000-acre estate. Just don’t drive off the bridge like Kendall Roy did and drown a waiter in the lake.
(He would have loved Eastnor’s Land Rover Experience, where drivers can take a pristine, valeted $140,000 vehicle and plow it over 60 miles of rutted track, mud, and water before returning it, satisfyingly splattered, to the bothy.)
“That’s the sofa where Logan Roy administered a bollocking to Kendall after he tried to buy Waystar-Royco,” says Imo Hervey-Bathurst, who, as the slinky eldest daughter (of five), is the estate’s director. (Primogeniture!) I consider the pale-green specimen covered in plush chenille with renewed interest.
Eastnor meets the high demands for comfort required by the 21st-century wealthy. It’s so sumptuous that the furnishings company Watts 1874 is launching a range of fabrics and wallpapers based on the castle this year. Its magnificent interiors—a fruity jumble of Venetian, chinoiserie, and English styles—resemble, in some rooms, Uncle Monty’s Chelsea cottage in Withnail and I rather than a 97-room mock castle from the late Georgian period. This turns out to be no coincidence: In the 90s, it was renovated by Bernard Neville, a professor of textiles at London College of Fashion whose house in Glebe Place was used as a filming location for Bruce Robinson’s black comedy.
Harvey Keitel was the castle’s first P.G. (that’s posh for “paying guest”). Others have included Michelle Pfeiffer and David E. Kelley, the Big Little Lies writer who was also best man at Hervey-Bathurst’s wedding, a small affair of 400 guests. “The cast and crew of Succession were here for six weeks, too,” she recalls. So was Madonna, who checked in while directing W.E., her film about Wallis Simpson and Edward VII.
Ashlar-hewn Eastnor is so monumental it looks like it would outlast the crack of doom, but Hervey-Bathurst’s grandmother investigated blowing it up in the 60s. This was the fashion at the time, when expensive country houses were reduced to rubble by their impoverished owners. But then an investigation revealed that she couldn’t afford the dynamite. Pure Evelyn Waugh.
Now, Hervey-Bathurst is determined to re-invent it for the Saltburn generation. “Staying in an authentic and beautiful family home on a real estate is a money-can’t-buy experience,” she promises. “Rather than being grand, Eastnor is eclectic, unexpected, and fun. And warm!”
Eastnor Castle’s rental rates begin at $15,000 per night
Rachel Johnson is a journalist and author. Her books include The Mummy Diaries, Notting Hell, and Rake’s Progress: The Madcap True Tale of My Political Midlife Crisis