Exteriors

Clean Slate

The rugged, bosky fastness of Glyn Cywarch, the 17th-century seat of the Harlech family in north Wales, gives the house an atmosphere of untamed enchantment. Tallulah Harlech, with her mother, Amanda, has recently restored the ancestral pile, creating an interior that is as clean and minimal as the exterior is mystical and wild

Is it William Morris’s arsenic-infused wallpapers or Daphne du Maurier’s metaphors that have suffused Britain’s country houses with sly magic? Or is it their settings? Eryri National Park in Wales (formerly known as Snowdonia) is one such mythic backdrop, with its hilltops whipped by roaring winds and its gloomy woodland, and thick mists sweeping in from Cardigan Bay like a rushing tide. Here, dressed all in black and with her hair blowing across her face like a figure from folklore, Tallulah Harlech stands near an ancient crown of standing stones, pointing out landmarks, including the fog-obscured path to Glyn Cywarch, her family’s ancestral home. The Grade II*-listed house undoubtedly has that eerie enchantment peculiar to country piles: ‘I don’t just want to use the word “magical”,’ says Tallulah, ‘but something does happen when you go there.’

An ironwork gate set into the Welsh stone walls surrounding the garden at Glyn Cywarch, where ancient pleached apple trees form rows between wildflowers and unmown grass. Photograph: Emma Hardy

Built in 1616 by William Wynn, whose coat of arms hangs above the fireplace in the newly redecorated Long Room, Glyn is ringed by woodland, sheep-dotted fields of knee-high grass and, closer, a walled garden with pleached apple trees and beds of wild roses. The house’s name, in Brontëan character, means ‘Vale of Hemp’, harking back to the rope made to furnish ships in the nearby trading port of Porthmadog.

Glyn has been the Harlech seat since the 1800s, coming to the family through an interesting quirk of inheritance that favoured women for almost two centuries. ‘This is a mega-women stronghold,’ says Tallulah, who, along with her mother, the fashion muse and creative consultant Amanda, spearheaded the project of restoring the house ‘from the roof down to the plumbing’ when it passed to Tallulah’s brother, Jasset, in 2016.

Old farmhouse-style tables are put end to end in the Jacobean dining hall to allow the room to perform its original function without making it too formal or fussy. Photograph: Alice Inggs

Tallulah’s childhood involved occasional summers spent with Karl Lagerfeld in Biarritz – his home, described in 2000 by Vogue as ‘a study in spare luxury’, would be an enduring aesthetic influence for her. But more often, rather than going to Europe during school holidays, the whole clan and assorted pets packed into a car and trundled to Wales. ‘My father didn’t allow us to go abroad because he said we didn’t have any money, which is partially true,’ says Tallulah wryly. ‘We just had these amazing houses filled with inherited objects that were slowly decaying.’

When Francis Ormsby-Gore, 6th Baron Harlech, died in 2016, Glyn hadn’t been touched since the 1970s. ‘We suddenly had to take on everything that was entrusted to us,’ says Tallulah. To raise money for the restoration, Jasset auctioned off the contents of the house – a miscellany that included silver alms dishes and oil paintings, a library of rare books, George III giltwood armchairs and a 1936 Lagonda Rapier.

A lick of white paint on the floorboards and a linen dust sheet help create a sense of cool but not overbearing minimalism. ‘Because both my parents are maximalists, I needed a kind of clarity and peace in the rooms,’ says Tallulah. Photograph: Alice Inggs

A peek into one of the attic bedrooms with their parchment-coloured lime-washed walls. The spartan furnishing is an intentional way of ‘getting back to the authentic shape of the rooms’. Photograph: Alice Inggs

‘Austere’ might be one way to describe Glyn now, at least in contrast to its previous chintzy incarnation, but there’s also a sense that it is a palimpsest rather than a bare canvas – certain key features of the old house have been left intact (the original tiled fireplaces; the wood panelling and stone steps; graffiti believed to be by the 18th-century writer Ellis Wynne), while new additions add to the modern history of Glyn’s ownership, such as a daybed given to Amanda by Karl Lagerfeld. In the Long Room, the new storm-coloured concrete floors replaced the ill-advised parquet laid 50 years ago. Photograph: Alice Inggs

Tallulah and Amanda took on the renovation of the interiors, relegating the peeling toile wallpaper, flowery curtains and unprepossessing cabinetry to the untouched billiards room in the old gatehouse. ‘There’s a coolness of tone that I find restorative,’ says Tallulah. ‘There are plenty of homes that do a kind of British boho, with a heavy heaviness of texture and a cosy countryside feel. Glyn, though, just isn’t that, and that’s not the sensibility that I ever wanted to run through it.’

New Glyn is, in contrast, as cleanly attractive as a bird’s egg in a tangled nest. Surrounded by thickety woods and Welsh stone, the John Pawson-inspired interiors have the same chic froideur as the women whose vision brought them into being. ‘It’s having them be very pure and clean, knowing that there’s so much to see in terms of texture and colour outside,’ says Tallulah.

Amanda and Tallulah sit in an alcove in one of the attic bedrooms, where the windows open on to a view of the rose garden, gatehouse and the wild border. The lime plasterwork was left unpainted, while the hemp-insulated walls were contoured to mimic the 17th-century building techniques originally used in the house. Photograph: Emma Hardy

A fragment of a painted inscription, believed to be by Welsh author Ellis Wynne, on the wall of the Poet’s Room. Photograph: Emma Hardy

Plain linen features heavily – draped over furniture as dust sheets or used as slipcovers; expanses of polished-concrete floors are both utilitarian and reminiscent of the gloomy Welsh sky. There’s a kitchen Nigel Slater might love, its sooty lacquered joinery the colour of woodsmoke. Upstairs, parchment-coloured limestone walls recall the history of the house and its 18th-century literary inhabitant, Ellis Wynne, who is said to have written some of his works in what is known as the Poet’s Room, and is believed to have painted the dragons and flowers on the walls in a fit of manic imagination.

Glyn is available to rent for short or long stays. As such, the kitchen tends towards functionality: there is an Aga but also an electric oven; large stainless-steel worktops and sinks, as well as a dishwasher. Black lacquer cabinets and slate floors are a nod to old fireplaces. The metal chairs were a gift to Amanda from Karl Lagerfeld. Photograph: Alice Inggs

A small washroom on the ground floor is a storage space for vases, baskets and other assorted objects from the main house. Here, something of the fundamental simplicity of the house is evident – the bare bones Tallulah wanted to make visible. Photograph: Alice Inggs

The interiors were only one aspect of the full restoration of the Glyn estate, however. The process was, as Tallulah says, a question of ‘how to respect the land’. Even when coming up with schemes for the interior renovation, the family was mindful of ‘how the light moves and the history of the Welsh stone – how it performs at different temperatures and allows for a sensation and a tone when you’re in a room, or when you face it from outside or from the doorway or a window’. That sense that the land surrounding Glyn is part of the house itself was further accentuated by Yorkshire-based garden designer Sarah Husband, who has been involved in reimagining the gardens and greenhouses for the past six years.

‘My brother has inherited a real Victorian appreciation of lawns,’ says Tallulah. ‘We’re trying to steer him away from that.’ Beyond the garden the land unravels into wildness. Exploring walking paths or cattle tracks, one might stumble over the crenellated folly in which Tallulah played as a child or the crumbling owl-haunted outbuilding that she wants to restore one day. Photograph: Emma Hardy

A Victorian rose garden first planted by Tallulah’s ancestors circles an old gatepost set in the centre of the lawn like a menhir. To the left, in the shadow of the trees and under a canopy of branches, are the paths that Tallulah and her brother explored as children. Photograph: Emma Hardy

‘Sarah has a very deep understanding of what we had inherited; how everything had effectively dilapidated and how to reinstate it and take care of the rare things that are here,’ says Tallulah. ‘She’s unbelievably sympathetic and aware of the landscape and Glyn’s microclimate; of how things come into flower. Little by little, season by season, she’s been able to investigate them.’

Now, roses climb the crumbling stonework of the walled garden in which espaliered trees frame the house. Tufted grasses grow high between mown walks that run between ancient pleached apple trees. Wildflowers and nut trees have been planted along one edge to attract wildlife; the border is a wall of woodland. This suspension between intentional and uncultivated produces a feeling that the garden would fall back into wildness as soon as one looks away.

Tallulah circles the Bronze Age Bryn Cader Faner ring cairn, which lies not far from Glyn on an ancient trackway from the sea to the Rhinogydd mountains. Photograph: Emma Hardy

Marsh flowers on the moors. Amanda often swims in the lakes here, whether in sun or sleet. ‘When I was a child, Glyn was a place of imagination, exploration and adventure,’ says Tallulah. ‘Taking care of the land has always run very closely to the heart of all of us in the family.’ Photograph: Emma Hardy

Beyond the newly restored Victorian rose gardens, first planted by Tallulah’s forebears, and up past the waterfall that now provides hydroelectric power to Glyn, are grazing fields for a flock of sheep tended by a woman referred to as the ‘good shepherdess’, who employs traditional techniques to manage her charges. Slowly, the land is turning back to itself. Ospreys have returned to the 5,000 acres at Glyn in the past few years. ‘I think our responsibility is to pass it on in a better state than the one it was in when we received it,’ says Tallulah. ‘We are working to help the regeneration as much as we can and to cultivate a sensibility towards nature and everything that we’re surrounded by, from the soil to the trees to the water to the wildlife. It’s about being mindful in the myriad choices that we make as stewards of this place now.’ And in that, perhaps, are the workings of magic.

For more information and to book a stay at Glyn Cywarch, visit glyncywarch.co.uk

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