The Sunday Telegraph Sunday 1 September 2019^ *** 11
PROPERTY
‘I don’t believe estates have to be in retreat’
The Beaumonts are
keen to modernise their
sprawling Bywell Hall,
but they’ll always keep
it in the family, they tell
Eleanor Doughty
CHARLOTTE GRAHAM FOR THE TELEGRAPHGREAT ESTATES
mad when there’s this house here. All it
needed to make it a home was a kitchen
we could use.” The lost years of Bywell
have been a blessing in some ways.
“We have bypassed the awkward thing
of moving into a house where someone
has to move out.”
It’s been a fun project. The next
stages are outdoors, ultimately restor-
ing the walled garden, which has “run
wild”, says Vanessa. “It’s bigger than
the footprint of the house.”
Unlike some of his peers, Wenty, an
art adviser, didn’t grow up with the
pressure of inheriting Bywell on his
shoulders. “There wasn’t the ‘you’re
the next generation and all of this must
continue’. I never had that.”
He is keen to modernise the busi-
ness, which is a big one: 17,000 acres
with 100 residential properties, a farm
let to Newcastle University, a grouse
moor, a salmon beat on the Tyne, and
woodland. “No one is allowed to use
the word ‘tenant’ any more,” he says.
“It’s client. Yes, it’s a traditional estate
with a big house in the middle, but
we’re trying to make it work in a pro-
gressive way.”
He isn’t convinced by the idea that
everyone who has a pile to inherit must
tend to it as soon as they can. “This
British thing that people expect you to
‘go home’ [to take it over] is outdated.
Obviously you’ve got to be able to pro-
vide the leadership that is required, but
what one learns from outside business
interests is every bit as valuable.”
These kind of assets “shouldn’t be a
noose around people’s necks,” he says.
“I don’t believe estates have to be in
retreat. It’s not about fighting a rear-
guard action and clinging on. I want to
be acquiring assets, buying things
rather than selling.” He isn’t fussed
about more land, but he’d like to buy
more art for the house and build a
sculpture collection.
Selling Bywell, which is open 28
days a year for tours, is now out of the
question. “The more Bywell comes to
life, the more it makes sense to have it,”
says Vanessa, who is writing a book.
“You see the benefit your children get
from the house, and how much they
love coming here – it’s not an academic
decision, it’s an organic family one.”
The couple don’t imagine that they will
move up to Bywell full time. “I could‘There was a big kitchen,
where the chef could
cook for 40, but
nowhere to make a tea’
‘You see the benefit
your children get from
the house, and how
they love coming here’
NOT QUITE
GOING
HOME
The Hon.
Wentworth
Beaumont and
his wife Vanessa
at Bywell Hallnever not imagine this as part of my
life, but at the moment with work and
children and school, we’re in London,”
says Vanessa. “It feels far but it’s not –
it’s only two hours 40 minutes from
King’s Cross.”
The architectural historianNikolaus Pevsner described Bywell as
“probably the most beautifully placed,
picturesque and architecturally re-
warding group of buildings in the
Tyne Valley”.
“I quite want to keep it that way,”
says Wenty.O
utside Bywell Hall,
the weather is
gloomy and the
vast Northumber-
land skies are grey.
But inside, the wel-
come couldn’t be
warmer. A trio of
children skids around the hallway,
nanny in tow. The Hon. Wentworth
“Wenty” Beaumont and his wife Va-
nessa emerge from the madness,
proffering cups of tea.
But the scene wasn’t always so
cheering. For 30 years, Bywell Hall, a
Grade II* listed, 18th-century coun-
try house, looked more like the un-
loved storeroom of a Victorian
museum than a family home.
Wenty’s great-grandfather, Went-
worth Beaumont, 2nd Viscount Al-
lendale, lived at the Palladian
building quite happily. “He had two
houses, Bywell and Bretton Hall,
[whose grounds are] now the York-
shire Sculpture Park, which was sold
before the war. When he died in
1956, my grandparents moved in,”
Wenty explains. (Each of the Vis-
counts Allendale, since the title was
created in 1911, has been called Wen-
tworth Beaumont – as will the next
one, currently aged five.)
Wenty’s father moved to Bywell
when he was eight. “He married my
mother in 1975, and moved out again,
so he didn’t live here for long.” The
3rd Viscount, Wenty’s grandfather,
divorced from his
wife in 1984 and
continued living
at Bywell alone –
in one room.
“We used to
come here as chil-
dren and it was
very dank and
cold. It smelt
funny. It was like
going around a
museum – every-
thing had sheets
on it.” Wenty grew
up imagining that
the house, which
has “about 16 bed-
rooms”, would be
sold. “It was sad,
closed up, un-
loved. It didn’t
have a point.”
Once upon a
time, though, By-
well, bought by
the Beaumonts in
1810, had been the
life and soul of the
Allendale estate. In the downstairs
lavatory is a letter to Lord Allendale
from the Conservative prime minis-
ter Anthony Eden, asking to be put
up for the night in 1955. “My grand-
father’s cousin Lady Margaret
Fortescue, who owned Castle Hill in
Devon, used to come and stay in the
Thirties when she was a child, and
she said it was the happiest house.”
When Wenty’s grandfather died in
2002, the house was mothballed.
Seven years later, the London-based
family looked at the house anew.
With the hedge fund manager
Crispin Odey, a family friend, they
began work doing up the communal
areas and the bedrooms. “We semi-
share it with him,” Wenty explains,
an arrangement that also extends to
a grouse moor.
When Vanessa and Wenty, who
married in 2011, thought about turn-
ing the house into a real home, it
didn’t even have a proper kitchen.
“There was a big industrial kitchen
where the chef could cook for 40,
but there was nowhere to make a cup
of tea,” says Vanessa.
They changed that last summer,
installing an open-plan country
kitchen and a snug behind it. They
now use the house for holidays and
weekends. “We wanted somewhere
for our children,” Vanessa says. “Do-
ing up a cottage would have been‘THE HAPPIEST HOUSE’
The TV room at Bywell Hall, top; the
hallway, above, and the kitchen, belowRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws