05/09/2026
Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire. Eight hundred years of walls and the stories they hold. It came to its most famous occupant, Charles Brandon, the 1st Duke of Suffolk, through a marriage that scandalized Tudor England , he secretly wed the king’s own widowed sister without permission, survived the consequences, and somehow remained Henry VIII’s closest friend for life. The original bad boy of the English court. The castle stayed in his family’s lineage, passing again and again through the women of the Willoughby de Eresby line, one of the few baronies in England that has always been able to descend through daughters. The current custodian, Jane Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby, the 28th Baroness, received it in 1983 and has held it with quiet, extraordinary grace ever since.
The rooms are magnificent in the way that only accumulation across centuries can produce. Thrones from three different monarchs, tapestries stitched by the men of the house, a Vanbrugh hall that stopped me in my tracks. But the room that stayed with me is tucked away in a 13th-century tower, small and otherworldly and barely documented anywhere online. Individual birds and flowers, hand-cut and pasted directly to the walls, with foliage painted in by hand to join them into a living scene. The birds on the ceiling came from a packet of leftover cutouts found somewhere on the estate. I was captured by the preciousness of the room. Obviously not opulent in the same way, but definitely at my alley.
Some rooms are designed to impress. That one was made to delight. There’s a difference, and I will always choose delight!
