Downton Shabby: A Commoner Takes on an English Castle

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The New York Times
By Joanne Kaufman

A Los Angeles actor and producer moved across the pond to restore his crumbling ancestral home. But fixing up a 50,000-square-foot manor isnt easy.

People who search genealogy websites often find birth and marriage records, newspaper clippings, faded photographs or maybe a long-lost relative.

Hopwood DePree found a 60-room English manor.

As a child growing up in Holland, Mich., in the 1970s, Mr. DePree was transfixed when his beloved maternal grandfather, Pap, a history buff, told him about a huge slice of rolling land across the ocean where his forebears had a grand house called Hopwood Castle.

A castle in Britain owned by his family? Named for his family? No way.

Fast forward three and a half decades. Mr. DePree, by then an actor and producer in Los Angeles, was at his computer early one night in the spring of 2013, trawling an ancestry website.

The past had become a favorite destination for him after Paps death in 2008 and, two years later, the sudden death of his father, Thomas, from a massive heart attack. Mr. DePree was left unmoored, uncertain about the way forward. Tracing his roots was a comfort.

That fateful evening, he saw a link to a story about a Lord Hopwood of Hopwood Hall and an old black-and-white photo of a very stately home in Middleton, England, just outside Manchester. Increasingly curious, Mr. DePree made some email inquiries and booked a flight to see firsthand the family seat.

A 50,000-square-foot, brick-and-stone manor built in a quadrangle around a timber-framed hall, Hopwood Hall had seen better centuries. The roof leaked prodigiously, dry rot was ascendant, moisture seeped from the walls, plaster was falling from the ceilings, windows were missing panes, floors were missing boards, many sections of the house had been vandalized. Trees were growing out of the chimneys.

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