W​​hen Laura Burlington married William Cavendish at County Waterford’s Lismore Castle in 2007, she joined a family that has served as the caretakers of Chatsworth – the platonic ideal of an English country house – for almost five centuries. In the years since, the former editor and model has quietly put her own fashionable stamp on the baroque pile in the Peak District – the inspiration for Mr Darcy’s Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice and a fixture on the moodboards of designers ranging from John Galliano to Alessandro Michele. It was Burlington who teamed up with the latter, during his time at Gucci, to put on a retrospective of Chatsworth’s clothing and textile archives curated by Hamish Bowles in 2017 – Burlington, too, who coordinated an exhibition honouring its former chatelaine Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, with Erdem Moralioglu, this summer.
Now she’s turned her well-trained eye on a respectful yet modish refurbishment of The Cavendish Hotel in Baslow, a former coaching inn on the estate supposedly won by the sixth Duke in a game of cards in the 1830s and presided over by “Debo†as a hotel in the ’70s. “I wanted [it] to feel fun and modern and welcoming – eradicating any feeling of stuffiness, which always makes me feel slightly gloomy in country-house hotels,†Burlington says of the interiors, overseen by designer Nicola Harding and punctuated with art from the Devonshires’ own collection.
In its 28 well-appointed rooms, the likes of Richard Smith’s technicolour pop-art prints (discovered among the bric-a-brac in Chatsworth’s nurseries) and Phyllida Barlow lithographs from the Hepworth Wakefield hang beside four-poster beds flanked with stacks of Enid Blyton paperbacks, while the common areas are dotted with paperwhites and hyacinths grown in the estate’s greenhouses and hand-thrown lamps by Joe Heath, a local potter and member of the main household’s staff.
Burlington’s hope is that The Cavendish will encourage guests to explore the Peak District beyond the Arcadian grounds that surround Chatsworth. Encompassing heather-strewn moorlands studded with limestone caverns, cosy tea rooms serving Bakewell tarts and Buxton puddings, and gritstone market towns that have scarcely changed since Constable painted the surrounding landscape in the early 19th century, Derbyshire, in particular, has plenty to lure the usual Cotswolds weekenders north this autumn – and that’s before mentioning its burgeoning arts scene.
“I love to go to Hathersage, to the David Mellor Design Museum,†Burlington says, referencing the 20th-century royal designer for industry credited with inventing both square Post Office boxes and the national traffic light system. “If you like antiques, then a trip to visit the Rutland Arms Antiques Centre in Bakewell is [also] a must.†Set within an old stable block once used by the likes of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron, the centre is home to more than 30 specialist dealers, whose wares range from Napoleonic memorabilia to mother-of-pearl combs from the ’20s. Equally worthy of attention: the Peak District Artisans. Next month, the collective of ceramicists, silversmiths and more is staging an exhibition at The Whitworth Institute, a Victorian neogothic centre built for the Derbyshire Dales community by the estate of industrialist Joseph Whitworth in the 1890s.
“Chatsworth is more than a house,†Burlington concludes. “It’s a whole ecosystem of makers and growers – and when you stay with us, you can experience the work of all those people.â€
