Charles Spencer: ‘good taste’ and your taste are not always the same thing

The writer is a historian and public speaker

When, in 1992, I inherited Althorp, my family’s ancestral home, I felt a responsibility to return it to how it had been for much of its 500-year history. For, over the previous decade and a half, the interior had been lavishly redecorated by my stepmother, Raine, whose taste and palette were inherited from her flamboyant mother, romantic novelist Barbara Cartland. Under the twin attacks of dizzying synthetic materials and an iridescent over-gilding of furniture, Althorp had lost its stately interiors to garishness.

Being just 27, and ignorant of interior design, I turned to John Cornforth, perhaps the leading British architectural historian of the time, to help me return things to how they should be. We toured Althorp’s principal rooms, assessing them for Raine damage.

Cornforth’s kind reassurances dwindled as we went. Finally, on entering the South Drawing Room — a cacophony of clashing pinks (on the walls, on the floor, in the curtains) — Cornforth rocked back in his tightly drawn lace-ups. “Goodness,” he mused. “I really can’t help you here . . . ”

As he departed Althorp that afternoon, he lobbed me a catch-all mantra that he hoped might help: “Good taste is authenticity — and authenticity is good taste.” Over the following years, as I took the rooms back to something close to how they had been originally, I felt I was restoring them to propriety.

I had bowed to an often-unstated pressure on those lucky enough to inhabit historic houses: to conform — to have the rooms they live in as they are expected to be, rather than as they would prefer them if they did not have the legacy.

“Born and raised in New York, my taste falls happily into the Early American category,” says Karen Lowther, who lives in Holdenby House, Northamptonshire. Built by Elizabeth I’s lord chancellor, at the time it was the largest private house in England. Lowther was fine with the oak floorboards and Georgian furniture inherited by her husband. But one of his busy ancestresses had bedecked Holdenby in high Victoriana, which Lowther did not like but might have felt duty-bound to maintain.

“Luckily, the lurid scarlets and turquoises Lady Clifden favoured had faded by the time I arrived, and I could replace them with their softer equivalents,” Lowther says. The dining room “sellotapestry” (so named because of the tape being used to hold the fraying pieces together) that was originally bright turquoise was replaced by a sage-green Claremont silk.

One room escaped her. “If I’d had a clean slate and been less overawed,” says Lowther, “I would definitely have killed the pink silk and gold curtains in the ballroom.”

But her regret is tinged with realism: “My taste is not what the general public is after, and my home is open to the general public. While the effusive comments in our visitors’ book prove that people enjoy visiting a house that is lived in, they come to a historic house for history.”

Some stately-home owners have dared to flout accepted form with élan. Aynhoe Park, a Palladian-style mansion on the Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire border, was bought by James Perkins, an event organiser with a background in antiques. He and his wife, Sophie, have filled Aynhoe with their collection of plaster casts and stuffed zoo animals, and a few years back it was called “the coolest house in Britain”. This is where Noel Gallagher hosted his 50th birthday and Jade Jagger her wedding. Perkins has said: “Not taking anything away from other country houses, but most of them are stuck in time. That’s rather charming, but most owners are living through their ancestors’ eyes.”

Aynhoe now has new owners and the Perkinses have decamped to Parnham Park in Dorset, which, with a hidden speakeasy in the cellars, is also available for innovative entertainment. Parnham’s website calls the property your “own private wonderland”. And that is precisely what the original stately-home builders intended.

Giles Kime, executive editor of Country Life magazine, says: “Historic houses were startlingly modern when they were built.” It is subsequent generations who have felt compelled to try to preserve them in aspic. Kime believes “contemporary art can look better in historic houses than Modernist galleries”. Many of the greatest houses — Blenheim, Chatsworth and Houghton — host exhibitions of new art, and Kime sees these as “a great opportunity for them to be modern again, even if just for a few weeks”.

Even if owners shirk from audacity, they can shake things up with panache. Kime points to how Spetchley Park, a Regency gem in Worcestershire, has recently been transformed by its owners, Henry and Kate Berkeley. The Berkeleys have the run of the house, rather than merely occupying the service wing, as recent generations had. It is a family home again, and the rooms have a new vibrancy, brought about in part by an extraordinarily bold use of colour.

While I was not as adventurous at Althorp, I have enjoyed adding modern and contemporary paintings by Edward Burra (when he was affordable) and Mitch Griffiths, for example, to the collection. I hope those who come after me will enjoy these — and that they may even have some fun bringing colour (but, please, no Cartland pink) to Althorp’s walls.