Two iconic York attractions have received the top recognition in the Historic Houses Awards.
The prestigious Historic Houses Awards aim to highlight the best in independently owned historic houses, castles, and gardens – and two of those are in York.
It was announced this week that Fairfax House won The Collections Award and Castle Howard won The Restoration Award.
The Collections Award, sponsored by Dreweatts, was introduced in 2022 to honour the owners, curators, and conservators who preserve, restore, and interpret the beautiful and significant objects on show inside historic houses, enabling the public to understand and enjoy them and the stories that they tell.
Fairfax House is a Georgian townhouse museum in the heart of York. In 2020, a new curatorial team took over the care and interpretation of Fairfax House and its collections. Whilst there was an established programme of small special interest exhibitions, understanding and interpretation of the house and its collections had changed little in 40 years.
Between 2020-2024, they delivered several new exhibitions, which prioritised creative storytelling and utilised more of their collections than ever before: over 450 collection items never previously exhibited were showcased during this period.
It’s home to the nationally significant Noel Terry Collection of eighteenth-century furniture, clocks, paintings and porcelain, alongside objects acquired by York Civic Trust to complement the recreated mid-eighteenth-century interiors and residency of the Fairfax family. Highlights also include the King David Panel by Grinling Gibbons and the John Butler Collection of glass.
Curator at Fairfax House, Dr Sarah Burnage said: “We are deeply honoured to receive this award and thrilled that the creativity and dedication of the Fairfax team has been recognised.
“This award will make a meaningful contribution to the development of our ongoing work, and we are immensely grateful to the judges, Historic Houses, and Dreweatts for this generous acknowledgement.”
Castle Howard received The Restoration Award, sponsored by Sotheby’s, in recognition of the work gone into the house and the lost Tapestry Drawing Room – which has been restored to its original 18th-century splendour for the first time since a devastating fire in 1940.
Launching in 2008, the projects submitted to the award aim to ‘reflect the dedication of owners to the care and sympathetic restoration of the incredible buildings that they own, inhabit and share with the public’, according to the website.
One of the most historically significant houses in Europe, Castle Howard has been home to nine generations of the Howard family across 300 years, with each contributing to its creation, evolution, and preservation.
Since the completed work, visitors have been able to see the fully restored and redecorated space – with the tapestries that originally hung in the room returned to their original positions for the first time since since the beginning of the 18th century.
“It’s amazing to win that prestigious award,” said Castle Howard visitor attraction director Abbigail Ollive. “It’s a huge team effort here – a lot of hard work goes into projects. Not just from the creative teams and from our contractors and specialists, but from our own team and the volunteers as well.
“We’ve got hundreds of volunteers who help make this place tick. So it’s really nice for everybody to win the award and just feel really proud of the year we’ve had.”
To find out more about the Historic Houses Awards, visit their website here.
