A foggy spring morning, and inside the crenellated and turreted walls of Lismore Castle coffee is being served in the neo-medieval banqueting hall of the County Waterford estate. Plates of lemon rosemary squares and chocolate biscuit cake made by head cook Teena Mahon line the long table. The scene is part Downton Abbey, part WI, calmly overseen by Denis Nevin, butler here for more than 45 years.
Seventy or so guests, the Friends of Lismore, are catching up — standing beneath the dramatic chandelier that once hung in the Great Exhibition of 1851, or sitting on pew-like seats — part of its conversion by Sir Joseph Paxton in the 1850s from a chapel into a room for considerably less pious pursuits. Between the guests wanders the Countess of Burlington (though she prefers Laura Burlington), the castle’s quietly spoken châtelaine — or at least when she is away from Chatsworth House, her primary residence in Derbyshire’s Peak District.
Dressed in a green corduroy suit, her hair in a schoolgirl bun, she has shyly been giving a talk about her new book, the first written about the castle and “a romp through the years” — some 800 of them. Moreover, it’s “a love letter to Lismore”, she says, filled with seasonal recipes from the castle kitchen and photographs of the gardens and house.
Snippets of conversation rise to the rafters. A mother with two toddlers hanging off her is enthused about the castle’s upcoming children’s festival: Towers and Tales. An energetic young man is focused on seeing the gardens — upper and lower — that run either side of the walled drive up to the castle. A glamorous older neighbour is looking forward to the annual opening of the contemporary arts programme — this year celebrating the 20th anniversary of Lismore Castle Arts, launched by Burlington’s husband William Cavendish, Earl of Burlington and future 13th Duke of Devonshire, in a once-derelict west wing, and which now extends into two further spaces in Lismore.
“It’s not lost on us how fortunate a position this is,” says Burlington, softly. “And we want to make the best of it and try and live in this — some might say — crazily old-fashioned way and bring it forward and include people in it [to] give meaning to what is a very privileged life.” The focus is “to make sure it has a positive impact”.
Burlington married Cavendish at Lismore in 2007. The same year, the couple was handed the castle’s reins by the current Duke and Duchess — followed by the duties at Chatsworth two years ago. Up until 2023, Burlington had juggled running Lismore with a career as a fashion consultant. She started out as a buyer for stores including The Shop at Bluebird; became a contributing editor for magazines such as Vogue and The World of Interiors; and came to sit on boards for organisations and businesses including the New Generation board of the British Fashion Council and Acne Studios. She is proud of her career, but has “put it away” to focus on “what I can do with these [new] opportunities”.
The Devonshires have set a tradition of innovative estate management: Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire (Cavendish’s grandmother, née Mitford, sister of novelist Nancy) famously nurtured Chatsworth as a business and a charity in order to pay the crippling double death duties she and the 11th Duke inherited along with the estate in 1950. In recent years, Burlington has spearheaded renovations and reimaginings of properties in the Devonshire family portfolio: Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire with interior designer Rita Konig, which was made available for private hire, and the Cavendish Hotel in Derbyshire with Nicola Harding, which recently won a travel award. They’re both part of the Devonshire Group — a portfolio of businesses and charities across the UK and Ireland that encompasses farming, accommodation and property development, and which underwent a strategic rebrand in 2024, emerging with a logo of a family heraldic snake. More modern, more inclusive, had been the brief.
At Lismore Castle, built on the site of Lismore Abbey in the seventh century, Burlington describes her custodianship as “not wanting to drop the vase” — a reference to Ai Weiwei’s photographic triptych of him dropping a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn, which she has hung beside one of the home’s many staircases. The castle came into the Devonshire family in the 18th century, when Charlotte Boyle married William Cavendish, soon to become the fourth Duke of Devonshire. But it was the sixth Duke who really rang in the changes — launching a neo-Gothic rebuilding mission led by Paxton (the architect behind Chatsworth) and commissioning interiors by John Gregory Crace (whose other projects included the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle) often using the Gothic Revival furniture of Augustus Pugin.
The external effect is imposing, the walls on the north side plunging hundreds of feet to the Blackwater River below. Inside, it’s grand, yes, but — with all the character a family brings — welcoming. Burlington shows me around at a brisk clip, explaining that there are essentially three main rooms (the drawing room, dining room and banqueting hall), a number of cosier sitting rooms, a vast kitchen down a long stone-paved corridor, and numerous bedrooms. She tells me there are 12 “A1” rooms — but I suspect there are a good deal more.
“Architecturally, [the castle is] quite odd as it’s a building that has been added on to,” she says. Significant later additions were made in the 1930s and 1940s by Lord Charles Cavendish and his wife Adele Astaire — dancer and sister of Fred (a frequent guest) — including a swimming pool (highly optimistic for the Irish climate, laughs Burlington), tennis court and modern plumbing.
In the late 1990s, Burlington’s parents-in-law overhauled the interiors with furniture specialist Jonathan Bourne and interior decorator Melissa Wyndham. The result is lots of Cole & Son and Watts wallpapers, a developed collection of Pugin furniture — now thought to be the largest in private hands — and contemporary art alongside the Old Masters. In the dining room, a huge skyscape by contemporary artist Peter Frie hangs opposite Van Dyck portraits of family members.
The Duke’s Room and the Duchess’s Room are particularly striking bedrooms, with their views on to crenellated turrets on one side, and the Blackwater from the front. The strawberry-bush-patterned twin Queen’s Room is pretty; it’s where JFK once slept. An upstairs playroom created by Burlington when her three children were younger is pure fantasy: fabric tepees, giant Connect Four, huge bean bags and a dressing-up rack.
The overall effect is an aristo hotchpotch as only centuries of eccentric characters can nurture. Never mind the Van Dycks, Burlington favours assortments of “clutter”. On one fireplace is a ceramic lion won by “Aunt Sophie” at a fair, a small plastic ball containing a chunk of the Berlin wall, and glass vases given as a thank you by Scandinavian guests.
“If you were to start with a blank canvas you would start a different way, but [the mix that’s here] is the real magic of Lismore,” she says. “That’s the fun; you’re not wandering around admiring marvellous taste everywhere. It’s actually such a relief.” An 18th-century tapestry hanging over the wall has a chunk boldly cut out by one duchess, to fit round a door. It’s shocking, and fabulous. One bathroom has an LA-chic mirrored bath that’s a homage to Adele Astaire.
“I try not to do anything that makes it into a different house — even if it would be more fashionable or chicer,” says Burlington. When the chintz Colefax and Fowler fabric on the sofa installed by Deborah “Debo” Devonshire was wearing away to nothing, there was much deliberation over the replacement. In the end, she recovered it in exactly the same design.
I do glean, though, that she invited Rosi de Ruig to update the lampshades in a mix of ikats and marbled papers; there are new pops of pattern by Pierre Frey and Robert Kime (“who William used to refer to as Robert Crime because the cost was so high!”); and contemporary art is continually being added — the corridor lined with Richard Long roof slates is particularly dramatic.
Some changes are met with resistance: after the couple married and added a pink sculpture by Franz West in the garden, Burlington received a “horrific letter [saying] that I had absolutely no understanding of the historic context that I was now living in, and I needed to learn where I was and what I was doing”.
But one of the most rewarding roles of the castle, says Burlington, is that “it’s a place to bring people together”. For a lunch of spring salad and curried fish stew followed by caramel custards and baked pears (several recipes for which I later find in Burlington’s book), I sit (on Pugin chairs) between Irish writer Robert O’Byrne — he has curated a group show on a Kunstkammer theme at the castle gallery, and is a riot — and London-based German artist Nicole Wermers, whose show is now on in a second gallery.
“I love it when people meet here and then you hear a year later that they have made a project together,” says Burlington. She wants “people to feel comfortable, not nervous or overawed or [worried about] what fork to use. I don’t expect people to know all the rules and codes of behaviour one might associate with a place like this.”
Outside, the fritillaries and daffodils are tossing their heads; a magenta magnolia (planted by Deborah) is resplendent. We skirt Adele’s pool (that Burlington says she chose to fill in, but left the outline as a sort of land art “joke”) and walk along the edge of the garden past ancient hedges, and an architecturally notable ridge-and-furrow Paxton greenhouse nurturing vines. We duck down under trees teasing blossom in the sundial garden, which Burlington reimagined in 2009 as a romantic, overgrown escape — a birthday present for her husband. She laughs, remembering how they had to block him entry for months on end.
Box blight supercharged an overhaul in the garden a number of years ago. In many ways it was freeing, she says: a way to open up the garden to become looser, wilder. Today the gardeners focus on biodiversity and pesticide-free practices: Burlington worries aloud that visitors might be upset by the weeds and wildness in the upper garden. The kitchen garden is thriving: communication between gardener Mervyn Hobbs and Teena in the kitchen is daily. Alongside classic veg, they also have fun experimenting: cucamelons are mentioned.
“It’s an extension of the house,” says Burlington of the garden: it feeds the castle literally and in spirit.
Bringing more people into creating Lismore Castle’s story seems to be the Burlington ethos. The looser the boundaries, the more the merrier, the richer the spoils.
Like Bolton Abbey, the whole castle can be rented out, clutter and all — with Denis and Teena steering things for guests. “That helps us keep it and maintain it, and keep everyone on,” says Burlington. “It keeps it sustainable.” In every sense.
“Lismore Castle: Food and Flowers from a Historic Irish Garden” by Laura Burlington (Rizzoli)
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