At a glance
- Client: The new owners of Trematon Castle, the founders of House of Hackney
- Location: Castle of Trematon, above the Lynher and Tamar near Saltash, Cornwall
- Years: 2019–2022. Our own site photographs run from 24 April 2019 to 7 January 2022
- Role: Wallcovering installation across the house and estate
- Wallcoverings: House of Hackney PLANTASIA, GAIA Prussian Blue, FLORA DELANICA, COSMOS, FLORA FANTASIA, ARTEMIS, HOLLYHOCKS, plus heritage Lincrusta relief
- Scope: strip-out and wall preparation, lining, papered ceilings including the atrium ceiling around its oval lantern, large-scale mural setting-out, pattern-matched full-height drops in bedrooms, bathrooms and a powder room, and laser-aligned Lincrusta relief
The castle
Trematon is one of Cornwall’s oldest fortifications: a Norman motte-and-bailey, built in 1068 and granted to the Duchy of Cornwall in 1337. The Duchy still owns it today. A 13th-century gatehouse still guards the bailey. Within the walls, an 11,000 sq ft Georgian manor with nine bedrooms was added in the early 1800s, its windows looking out over nine acres of gardens and the estuary beyond.
In 2018, after a chance visit to the gardens, House of Hackney’s founders took over from the landscape designers Isabel and Julian Bannerman as the castle’s custodians. They found a house of beautiful proportions that, in the founders’ words, needed “a lot of restoration”: paint stripped back to make “a blank canvas”, then a multi-year, foundational renovation. Trematon became the brand’s “spiritual home”, the setting of its own campaigns and the namesake of its TREMATONIA print.
The brief
To hang House of Hackney’s own wallpapers across the Georgian house. That meant large-scale murals, densely drawn florals and ceiling-to-ceiling “print drenching”, in a house where every wall is a little out of true and every ceiling a little out of level, and where the client is also the designer of the paper.
Our approach
Strip-out and preparation. Our photographs from 2019 and early 2020 show rooms taken back to bare plaster, old finishes scraped off and the atrium stripped and lined. Reinforced lining materials (Wallrock and Anaglypta cartons appear on site in June 2019) were used to give the hand-printed papers a true, stable ground.
Ceilings as a fifth wall. Several rooms were papered overhead. That includes the skylit atrium, where the print had to be cut around a decorative oval lantern and a chandelier rose, and the small box room, papered on all four walls and the ceiling.
Murals and setting-out. PLANTASIA is a panoramic forest landscape that does not forgive an error. Each drop was set out to plan, and photographs from June 2020 show the crew working on ladders across the full height of the room.
Pattern and seam control. Digitally printed papers in deep, saturated colours were batch-checked from the roll labels, and pattern matches were carried across corners, chimney breasts and door heads.
Heritage relief. In November 2021 the team installed Lincrusta, the embossed heritage wallcovering made since 1877. Panels were laid out on the table, then hung to a laser line for perfect vertical alignment.
Living house, long programme. The work ran in phases between 2019 and 2022, around a family home, a working estate and a house that was opening its doors to guests.
Materials
- PLANTASIA: panoramic forest-landscape mural
- GAIA – Prussian Blue
- FLORA DELANICA (Clay) (identified from our site photographs)
- COSMOS – Celestial Blue (identified from our site photographs)
- FLORA FANTASIA – Noir Stripe (identified from our site photographs)
- FLORA FANTASIA – Ecru (identified from our site photographs)
- ARTEMIS (Petrol / Blush) (identified from our site photographs)
- HOLLYHOCKS (identified from our site photographs)
- Lincrusta heritage relief (not House of Hackney)
Other House of Hackney designs that the press records at Trematon, but which we have not matched to our photos: FLORALIA (bedroom, per AD), GALANTHI (guest bedroom, per AD) and PHANTASIA – Selenite Orange (powder room, per AD). The brand’s TREMATONIA print is named after the castle; we have not seen it in our photos.
Since we completed, the founders have refreshed some rooms with newer House of Hackney designs. Today’s interiors will not all match our photographs.
Outcome
A Georgian house within a Norman castle, dressed wall by wall and ceiling by ceiling in the prints of the brand that lives there, across nearly three years of phased work. For a wallcovering contractor there are few sterner tests than hanging a designer’s own paper in the designer’s own home.
