“When we got a new prince last year, we were among the last to know about it,” says the porter of Palé Hall, the “Country House Hotel” built of golden sandstone. No wonder: the way to the mansion in Snowdonia, the wild west of Wales, leads through barren mountains with windswept trees and uncertain cell phone reception.
Below the peaks, the highest of which is Mount Snowden, woolly white sheep dot the green of the pastures. Behind the often cloud-shrouded peak of Wales’ highest mountain lies the Atlantic town of Caernarfon. Here in 1301, the ruthless King Edward “Longshanks” I, known from “Braveheart”, had enough of the Welsh resistance. He had previously ordered his heavily pregnant wife from London to the coast and later proclaimed his son, who was born there, as the first English Prince of Wales.
Angela and Alan Harper – she is a former teacher, he was the former CEO of Vodafone – also felt this sense of eternity when they drove up the driveway of the Palé Hall house for sale for the first time in 2016. “We immediately thought of Evelyn Waugh, writing of PG Wodehouse: His garden is like that from which we were all driven.” Palé Hall had miraculously escaped the fate of so many other mansions between 1945 and 1974. Around 250 castles and country houses were demolished in Great Britain at the time. Rising taxes and dwindling staff put an end to an era of luxuriously sprawling convenience.
Palé Hall’s roots as a family home are evident
The secret of the house? “Palé Hall was always modern, that’s what saved the house.” When Queen Victoria stayed here on her only visit to Wales in 1889, the house was heated and lighted by its own hydroelectric system. Because the third of the buildings was built by Henry Robertson, who brought the railway to Wales. His work was so unpopular with the farmers that he often had to survey the land by lantern light at night. Nevertheless, the industrial revolution brought undreamt-of wealth into his pockets.
Deserved rest: The rooms in Palé Hall offer absolute silence
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Image: Palé Hall
Palé Hall was a hospital and children’s home during both world wars. But even when the house later stood empty for years as the property and hunting lodge of the fourth Duke of Westminster, it was heated carbon-neutrally around the clock. There was no mold or rot. Today, the remaining switches and indicators from the earlier turbines in the heart of the hotel make every engineer’s heart beat faster.
Its roots as a family home are evident in the very cozy Palé Hall. The Harpers weren’t looking for a hotel either, they were looking for a retirement home. The couple went to school together, but only found each other online years later after their first failed relationships. “How could I ever forget the fancy Head Boy with the green Triumph Spitfire?” laughs Angela Harper.