William Constable dithered rather when it came to the creation of Burton Constable's Great Drawing Room.

Designs for a Dining Room in this space were commissioned from both Thomas Atkinson and Timothy Lightoler, but William then appears to have changed his mind. Instead, a design was submitted by Lightoler for a museum to house William's Cabinet of Curiosities with an 'experiment room' attached. Given that William did at one point nearly kill himself experimenting with electricity (presumably putting the Hall at some risk of burning down too), it is perhaps fortunate that this design was superceded by another! In 1775 William married Catherine Langdale, who presumably took William's indecision in hand and requested the room now finally created - a Great Drawing Room commissioned from James Wyatt.

Although Wyatt did some work on the Great Hall (we have receipts of £246-6s-0d for supplying French glass for the mirrors), his notorious unreliability soon led William to employ the firm of Chippendale to complete the work. Chippendale's supplied the completed mirrors, a pair of pier tables to support Italian marble slabs brought back from William's Grand Tour, a large suite of furniture and a pair of window pelmets. Their bill alone came to £1,100, the equivalent of £86,000 today.

Other craftsmen were also employed on this grandest of projects. Jeremiah Hargreaves carved the three doorcases and added girandoles, decorative gilt-wood wall decorations, John Bacon carved a stone chimneypiece and Giuseppe Cortese completed the ceiling. Cortese's ceiling still provides something of a talking point among staff and volunteers -while it was described as being painted in a 19th Century book on the history of Holderness*, analysis has found no trace of paint remaining. 

The walls of the Drawing Room were papered with green verditer, and would have looked quite dark to our modern eyes; besides the gilded mirrors, pelmets and girandoles there was little other embellishment.

In c. 1900 the carpet was removed and the furniture cleared to transform the room into a ballroom to host social events such as the prestigious Hunt Ball - riotous events that saw huge numbers of visitors and ran into the early hours of the morning with all the local gentry dressed in their best. Family events such as birthday parties would also have been grand affairs, as pictured in this photograph from c. 1910.

The room remained as a ballroom for the next century - quite a record, for a room which from its creation had already seen so many changes. As the Constable family tried to raise funds to maintain the Hall and its grounds, a wider and wider variety of events such as weddings and pop concerts were held here! Following 1992 when the family was forced to sell the hall to the Burton Constable Foundation, ife became distinctly quieter for this room - until 2001, when an ambitious project began to restore it to all its former glory of the Victorian age.

Although the mirrors were installed in one piece in the 1700s, they could not be removed the same way as damp issues meant that metal fittings snapped as plates were removed. The gilding on the mirror frames also needed to be restored, with analysis prior to the work being carried out revealing that the 18^th Century gilding had been regilded in the 19^th Century.

Chippendale’s wonderful pelmets above the windows required conservation too; our House Technician Gary assisted conservator Ian Fraser and David Hudson to remove them, before they could replace the woodworm eaten sections and place additional Aerolam in the arch to strengthen and support it. The textile sections were then conserved by textile conservator Caroline Rendall before the pieces could be proudly reinstated.

Chippendale's exquisite suite of furniture was also showing the wear of the years, with the chairs needed to be covered with a fine net to strengthen the surface of the remaining fabric.

Our fabulous gilded palm tree ottoman also came in for its share of TLC to reverse an earlier ‘operation’ to shorten it, restoring it to its full height.