It was Diana’s home. Now Earl Spencer’s third wife, is transforming it with a bouncy castle in the dining room and grand plans for the Princess’s grave ...
As its current master Charles Spencer loves to boast, Althorp has been home to 19 generations of Spencers, a fittingly imposing ancestral seat for one of England’s foremost aristocratic families.
In the middle of the silk-lined state dining room, added in 1877, where Spencers have sat down since to dine, plot and advance the fortunes of their clan, now sits a bouncy castle.
The unlikely pop-up ‘soft play area’ for their three-year-old daughter, Lady Charlotte Diana, is just one of many bold, family-friendly improvements introduced by the Canadian-born new Countess Spencer.
The former Karen Villeneuve has taken on the management of the 13,000-acre Northamptonshire estate and, as chatelaine of the childhood home and final resting place of Princess Diana, she is overseeing a major renovation project that will include a new memorial for the princess on the island where she is buried.
It often takes a complete outsider to break so drastically with history and, as a former hotel receptionist, the new countess couldn’t be more of an outsider to the ancient world of Althorp.
‘A lot of people are quite surprised by it!’ trills Lady Spencer, 44, “But I’ve always believed this house should be lived in. The one problem is that the children get terribly upset when we actually want to use the state dining room for . . . well, dining. If it’s survived previous generations of Spencer children, I’d like to think my three-year-old won’t destroy it!’
It would be hard to imagine her famously haughty husband — Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer — being overjoyed with such an affront to Althorp history. But in a major interview with People magazine this week, he laughs off the controversy. ‘It’s a proper castle! What else would we have,’ he jokes.
Admittedly, People is part of a gushing U.S. media which prefers to ignore the earl’s shortcomings and see only his sunny side.
But his emergence as a laid-back family man is quite a turnaround from the serial philanderer who is rather better at bouncing around in bed than he is on an inflatable castle.
So has the aristocracy’s most notorious lothario finally been tamed? Friends say Earl Spencer, now 52, has been ‘totally smitten’ with his third wife — a willowy, striking brunette and divorced mother of two — ever since he met her on a blind date at a cocktail party in 2010.
Earl Spencer spent a miserable childhood at Althorp, owned in his early years by his grandfather, complaining that he and Diana weren’t allowed to touch anything or even speak that much. ‘I think I can hear him right now, quietly revolving in his grave,’ he says with what sounds like some relish.
Given the fate of the previous two countesses, who also thought they had captured his heart, Lady Spencer can be forgiven for wanting to make her mark on Althorp while her husband still has eyes only for her.
And so the newest chatelaine of the ancient Spencer estate has set to her task with zeal, making short work of overhauling its dusty traditions and less-than-adequate bathrooms. It remains to be seen, however, whether she will also succeed in reforming the Earl himself.
Daily Mail