“Rethink everything” is the motto emblazoned on the newly revamped Denton Reserve website. At first glance, the slogan seems at odds with the property – while the world around it may have changed drastically, this is an English country house that has proudly stood looking across North Yorkshire’s misty moors since the 13th century. Change doesn’t seem to be something the manor has ever had to face head-on. But, as of 2022, the estate has become one of the UK’s most ambitious eco-friendly renovation projects, transforming this historic home into one of the country’s best examples of carbon capturing and biodiversity.
It’s a mammoth undertaking – one that is not lost on Lou Davies, co-founder of Box 9, the interior design and architecture agency hired to take on the project. “It really was so obvious at the beginning that we shared the same values as the client and the team working on the project – the same mission, the same philosophy on life, the same kind of solution-based ethos,” she explains. “When he talked about his vision for the wider estate, and I talked about my passion for craft and nature, we realised that this would be such a symbiotic relationship. I think we won the project just because of our clear passion to do better and to restore the planet slowly.”
But where do you begin with a project of this size? The estate stretches out across 2,500 acres of dense woodland, boggy moors, overgrown fields and glassy lakes, and, as well as the main manor house – Grade-I-listed hall with 26 bedrooms – there are farmhouses, cottages, coach houses and barns to consider.
“It was very noisy in the Hall before we started,” Davies says. “Every room was so overwhelming, it gave you a headache. It was just every colour, every pattern – everywhere you looked, there was clutter. So we started by asking: how do we quieten this entire space? The aim was to bring everything back to nature so that people could look out and pause, and breathe. So that’s where it all began, I guess – by softening everything and calming it down.”
“We tried to strip it out and start from scratch, but obviously it’s listed, so it was definitely a challenge,” she admits. “It was the most joyful experience when it was finally empty. It was like everything had been lightened, like a weight had been lifted and all the baggage was gone. The Hall was literally just able to take a breath, a big sigh of relief. Then, you really started to see how majestic and vast the spaces were without all the extra stuff. Your eyes are drawn to the detail rather than the noise.”
It’s not just the Hall that's able to breathe – as you enter the space, a sense of calm washes over you almost immediately. The vast size of the entrance hall, with its stuccoed ceilings soaring high above; the earthy tones, each turning a different shade as the sunlight shifts; the giant tangle of heather woven into a dangling ceiling light above – each sight as physically breathtaking as the next, forcing you to stop, look around and take it all in.
It’s the contrast between what you traditionally expect from a building like this and the reality of the redesign that is most striking. “We had a really brave and quite bold vision to do something unconventional, and to create a space in a stately hall that had never been seen before,” Davies explains. “We wanted to bring nature from the moors inside the building – you can see that straight away from these heather lights. We harvested the heather from the moors and used incredibly talented weavers [from Studio Amos] to turn it into these enormous lights. We wanted to allow nature and organic forms and craft back into a space that would’ve historically tried to keep that out.”
Picture any grand manor houses you’ve seen before – most have plush velvet, gilded detailing, bright colours of powerful reds, strong greens, bold blues. Denton feels so markedly different from that visual – a defiant rejection of the flashy abundance has historically defined luxury. “There was a constant strive for perfection, for everything to look polished and refined. I wanted to unravel that. I think perfection is uncomfortable. People don’t find that a calming space to be in.”
The rest of the house maintains the tranquility of the entrance hall. Only three paint colours were used throughout the entire hall, creating a natural flow as you move from room to room. There is, of course, furniture, art work and installations throughout, but on the whole each room is relatively bare, placing focus largely on the windows looking out to the rolling Yorkshire moors and wild meadows beyond.
“We create spaces that will evoke a feeling in people, so the aesthetic here was one of balance,” Davies says. “It’s about harmony and, to use the old phrase, less is more. We wanted to really empty the space and then really consider carefully what goes back in.”
You can see that in each and every item within the house – everything is placed deliberately, sourced meticulously and has a story behind it. “We wanted every single piece we installed inside the building to be quite elemental, to continue the theme of making the incredible landscape outside feel present in all of the rooms. So each object, furnishing, art piece has either been handcrafted using natural materials or inspired by nature,” Davies says. “We believe that when things are crafted in that way, they are good for your mental health and for your wellbeing. They calm the mind. It feels intimate.”
It’s hard to walk past an object and not feel drawn in. In the lounge, an old boardroom table that sat in one of the house’s old stately rooms has been transformed into something much more original. “It was an important piece so we didn’t want to get rid of it, and it was so big we couldn’t get it out of the house,” Davies tells us. “So we asked one of our makers to reimagine it.” It now functions as a focal point for the room, a kind of games table – the maker, Jan Hendzel, used contemporary marquetry to carefully inlay decorative patterns into the table in the form of playing cards, and inserted drawers to hold different gaming paraphernalia. “We’ve had posts carved for the table and we’re having a net made by a leather maker, so people can play cards, or ping pong, or whatever they can imagine. The idea is to change the sense of a game being adversarial and for it to be more playful and more as a collective experience.”
Similarly striking, carefully created objects occupy every room. A vast marble table (1.8 metres wide) sits in the centre of the second lounge, made by a Spanish couple who transform waste and marble slabs from the construction industry into beautiful furniture. In one of the upstairs bedrooms, a desk is made out of sheep’s wool – a local maker shears the sheep, before the team at Solid Wool casts the wool in a natural bio-resin and turns it into sheet form, then transforming it again into a piece of furniture in collaboration with Box 9.
The art pieces equally draw attention immediately as you enter each room. A modern interpretation of Renaissance-style art hangs in the second lounge room, a piece from East London-based artist Rico White. “What we loved about his art was his contemporary approach to the artworks that you would’ve originally seen in the hall like this,” Davies says. “I love its rawness and the natural forms, the colour scheme. It’s really important to celebrate inclusivity and diversity in a place like this – historically, they wouldn’t have championed a black person and a painting in a hall like this. The piece shows a sort of gentle dance of life, I think, and that’s what we often talk about with our work – it’s a dancing balance, and celebration of life. It is really beautiful.”
In each room, this balance is felt – modern art pieces are hung above crooked wooden tables made from timber on the estate, ornate fireplaces are overflowing with climbing greenery and creeping plants, everyday objects are made out of natural, unexpected materials. There’s a story behind everything.
“Our philosophy is to honour the past and to learn from history and heritage. Craftsmanship is a way to keep that alive,” says Lou. “The original family who owned this building made their wealth in the textile industry, so it felt really significant to bring that back around and include that as part of our process. It’s important to know we are very much honouring the heritage, but that we’re not scared to do something different and contemporary with it. We want to prove that those two things can hold each other in the same space.”
Rethinking everything is clearly at the core of what is being done at Denton. From the impressive interiors of the Hall itself and the plans for the other buildings dotted around the grounds, to the blueprints for the rest of the estate – rewilding fields, reintroducing beavers, cleaning the lakes and water sources – the Denton team are transforming the area, turning it into a remarkable example of how history can be reinvented, regenerated and reshaped to cater to a better future.
Denton Hall is available to rent at dentonreserve.co.uk