A Room of One's Own: the Temple of Peace – inside a former PM's private sanctuary

Hawarden, or Penarlâg yn Cymraeg, is a small but perfectly formed village close to the border with England. Leafy, and with a striking tapestry of historic architecture, it is a pretty pocket of the country and a lovely place to live (I’d know – I grew up there). The Hawarden Estate has a strong hand in local life: a varied, versatile and vibrant operation that includes a cheery pub, The Glynne Arms, an enviable village farm shop, a selection of luxury holiday homes and a year-round roster of micro-festivals, walks, talks and events.

Ask anyone who lives in the area and they’ll be familiar with the work of the estate, which currently employs around 100 people. It’s a reciprocal relationship: “The point of us existing is that we exist in Hawarden,” says Charlie Gladstone, the man behind the idea. “When we go further afield, we lose our sense of purpose because a sense of place is critical to what we’re doing … With our business, we have to move it forward and keep it relevant. But the minute you take the essence out of something, you destroy it. So you have to work around that, leaning into the essence of it.”

Charlie is the great-great-grandson of former prime minister William Gladstone who made his home in the village with his wife, Catherine Glynne, in the late 19th century. The house itself was built in the mid-18th century – a striking country pile with a crenellated roofline that peers out from luscious parkland. Rather than change this important part of its life, Charlie tells me that he’s opted for more of an in-situ solution: “Moving into this old house, we realised there was an interesting way that we could decorate, which was to merge old and new,” he explains. “We have family portraits, but we also have contemporary art and furniture alongside period pieces, so our style developed through trying to make the house beautiful in our eyes. As a result, it’s become quite colourful and playful because it’s a good way of making these houses warm and approachable.” In doing so, Charlie and Caroline have cultivated a recognisable style, but this has come through slow, sensitive work, with a keen eye to the house’s history.

Nowhere is that history more tangible than in The Temple of Peace, the tongue-in-cheek name that William Gladstone gave his study. With its wood panelling, shelves jam-packed with books and miscellaneous gaggle of objects, stepping into the Temple of Peace is transporting; there is a warmth and tranquility to the room that befits its name. This is where William Gladstone came to wind down. (On particularly stressful days, he’d select an axe from his collection and take it outside to chop wood – a relaxing pastime of the former prime minister.)

Despite its stately feel, the room has been preserved in a way that eschews clinical curation, opting for a largely left-as-is approach that celebrates the lived-in qualities of the room. Here, Charlie and his wife, Caroline (formerly a designer for Laura Ashley) worked with, rather than against, the space. “We’ve restored a lot of the furniture in the Temple of Peace for the first time since William died, so it does feel a little bit fresher, without losing any of its essence,” says Charlie. Last year, the Temple of Peace was home to a display of contemporary artworks. Charlie, his daughter, Tara, and three curators staged an exhibition in the room following an open-call prize for artwork. Now displayed in the local church, the pieces were placed side-to-side with dusty tomes and letters – a considered contrast that distils much of Charlie’s approach to interlacing old with new.

This year, the Temple of Peace will be open by appointment to attendees of the Estate’s Summer Camp micro-festivals. “It’s an unusual, if not unique room, being part of a private home and simultaneously of significant wider interest,” says Charlie. “I think we have a role in making places as relaxed as we can. And one way of doing that, both in The Temple of Peace and the house as a whole, is by adding contemporary pieces around the fringes. You can do incredible things, design-wise, by putting six large contemporary pictures on a wall and leaving some antique furniture below them.”

Alongside this desire to look forward, Charlie and his family have felt keenly aware of the importance of reflecting on William Gladstone’s legacy. William’s father, John, owned several plantations in Guyana (then British Guiana); the largest had 430 enslaved people working on it. When Charlie moved into the house, the portraits of John Gladstone were removed. Since then, the family have worked to confront this past, working with the Guyanese government and diaspora to address Gladstone’s atrocities and legacy. This has involved funding a research position at UCL, travelling to Guyana to formally apologise and agreeing to pay reparations to fund further research into the impact of slavery. One of the questions that Charlie returns to is the one of “what sort of ancestor he wants to be” – how he wants to use the privilege he was born into to do better and to move forward in a meaningful, open way.

Charlie has also begun the Glynne-ification of the house. Catherine Glynne, who married William Gladstone, was from Hawarden, while Gladstone hailed from Liverpool. “It’s a funny accident of the patriarchy that we consider it to be a Gladstone home when, in fact, it’s a Glynne home, and the Glynnes had been in Hawarden since the 1700s,” Charlie explains. “When I first inherited the house, there were seven or eight portraits of men on the walls. And they were there by accident of birth – the eldest born men, right the way through Gladstone history. I’ve got four daughters as well as my two sons and my wife, of course. I just thought, what a bizarre thing to have: pictures of men the minute you come into the house. The front hall said that if you’re not a man you won’t get to be on the wall here. We’ve been trying to reclaim a little bit of Glynne-ness for that reason. The West End of the house is now full of portraits of women. It’s one of the things we’re trying to do – reclaim the estate in a sort of female mould …”

Traditionally associated with Gladstone, Charlie tells me that the process has also caused them to rethink Catherine Glynne’s influence on the Temple of Peace: “Catherine Glynne’s incursion in William’s life is also really interesting,” says Charlie. “She told William something along the lines of: ‘If you’d married someone as tidy as yourself, you’d have been an unbelievable bore.’ Apparently she used to write letters and leave them scattered all over the place. You can just imagine her in The Temple of Peace, making things relaxed by introducing some chaos.”

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