The renovations of Ince Castle, a manor house built in the mid-1600s on the rugged shores of Cornwall, in southwest England, were going to be extensive. But then its new owners, a London-based South African couple with two young boys, began spending weekends at this storied estate and realized they were actually happy with many of the things they’d thought about altering. “We had all these grand ideas, and drew up plans,” says one of the homeowners. “Then we arrived at the conclusion that we couldn’t really improve on the layout, and there were also limitations given it’s a landmark, so who were we to criticize 400 years of habitation?” They had hired British architect and designer Ben Pentreath, known for breathing new life into great historic properties.
Pentreath—who recently worked with King Charles III (then the Duke of Cornwall) on the creation of the town of Poundbury, a groundbreaking urban development in Dorset—says he was excited about reimagining the interiors of the “incredibly romantic” Ince (pronounced “inns”) Castle, a splendid example of Jacobean architecture featuring brick walls and four corner towers, and situated in the center of a lush 190-acre private peninsula surrounded by views of the River Lynher. In Pentreath’s mind, the edifice called for Arts and Crafts architectural details rather than the neoclassical elements that had been added more recently. The house underwent several changes over the centuries, including a significant restoration in the late 1980s, after a fire—reportedly caused by an unattended lit cigarette—gutted multiple rooms.
Yet, in the end, the designer left everything more or less as it was: The circular central staircase backed by Doric columns stayed, as did the glass kitchen cabinets and even the existing wallpaper in one of the bedrooms, a beautiful chinoiserie motif from the 18th century that somehow survived the fire. He did update the bathrooms and worked on several outbuildings, including a boat house and tennis pavilion. “I’ve been on that treadmill of doing massive makeovers, and this has been a very interesting lesson for me,” he says. “There are times when you don’t have to rip everything out—and it’s been lovely.” Pentreath embraced the potential of “good old-fashioned decorating,” unleashing his vivid imagination and spirit of levity on each and every room: a canvas measuring some 12,000 square feet in total. As a bonus, the budget that would have been used to knock down Ince Castle’s interior walls was now available to go shopping for special pieces of furniture, mostly antiques from the 18th and 19th centuries.