‘I hope future generations of the family won’t be horrified by what we’ve done’

When Lady Cara and the Hon. James Willoughby first opened Birdsall House to weddings and events in 2018, they were nervous.

In nearly 500 years of history, the house, near Malton in North Yorkshire, had never been open to the public. Cara and James inherited the house in 2017 from James’s late grandparents, Michael Willoughby, 12th Baron Middleton and his wife Janet, having lived on the estate since 2005.

Six years on from Birdsall’s big launch, Cara is feeling far more comfortable with the house, having spent time learning its ways, and getting the grips with what she describes as its “big character”. Considering the house’s potential, and what it was missing as an events space, two years ago the Willoughbys decided to try something new.

In April, the fruits of their endeavours were realised, when they opened a nightclub in the 19th-century basement kitchen complex, deserted since the 1950s. Where once stood a large main kitchen supported by pantries, meat larders and ice houses is now a party space with a bar and dance floor – perfect for standalone parties and wedding receptions.

As decadent as this sounds, it was something of a necessity. It was a way to deftly remove the cost of marquees from the overall wedding bill, and helped shore up the business model.

Cara admits that the current financial climate (the number of weddings are down this year before rising in 2025), might not have been the best time for such a venture.

“But as somebody pointed out”, she says, “if you build during the mean years you’re there and waiting when people are ready to spend. That stayed with me.”

Birdsall, the oldest part of which dates to 1540, is situated in what might be the highest concentration of stately homes in the country, 17 miles east of York. There are at least 12 big houses within 21 miles of Birdsall, “so you’ve got to stand out,” says Cara.

“It was about trying to create something that no-one else had in Yorkshire. I was going for the old Annabel’s vibe – the feeling of a members club but in the north.”

Like all projects of this kind in big houses where whole wings haven’t been touched for decades, getting the club up and running was akin to opening Pandora’s Box.

“You touch a piece of plaster and the whole thing falls off the wall, and you realise it’s a damp course issue… we have had every challenge going, but we decided that if we were going to do it then we should do it well.”

The Willoughbys have been at Birdsall since the early 18th century, though for a long period it was not their only house.

By the 1880s the family were the owners of almost 100,000 acres and five stately homes: Wollaton Hall, near Nottingham; Middleton Hall, near Tamworth; Applecross, in Wester Ross; and Settrington House, near Malton, as well as Birdsall.

In the 1870s, Henry Willoughby, 8th Baron Middleton and his wife Julia had 13 children, and were supported by 17 members of domestic staff, which kept the kitchen busy. After Henry Middleton died in 1877, his eldest son Digby took over Birdsall.

When war came in 1914, Digby had no sons, but four nephews by his next brother Ernest, and few would have worried about the line of succession.

But the war had other ideas. Ernest’s third son Captain Francis “Bobby” Willoughby was killed near Ypres in August 1915. Nine months later, his brother Commander Digby Willoughby died at the Battle of Jutland.

Their middle brother Guy survived, but within a decade of the war’s end both Digby Willoughby (senior) and his wife Eisa, and then his own parents Ernest and Ida, died.

Aged 37, Guy, the new Lord Middleton, was lumbered with an enormous death duties bill, equivalent to 80pc of his total inherited assets.

He began selling off the Middleton estates one by one: first Wollaton, built between 1580 and 1588 on land that had been acquired by the family around 1314; then Middleton, which had been in the family since the 15th century; before Applecross, and later Settrington.

Guy was reluctant to let go of Birdsall, and determined to make this the central Middleton base, cherry picked the contents of the other four houses and moved them in.

All the while the old kitchen, where the nightclub now sits, had been in constant use – but by the end of the Second World War the number of staff had dwindled to a handful.

Guy, his wife Angela and their four children relied on only a cook and a butler. There was no longer any need for the enormous servants’ hall complex below stairs and it was closed up, its 20-foot table left abandoned and the space used for storage.

The daily kitchen moved upstairs into one of the six former sculleries that were later merged to create the modern kitchen the Willoughbys use today.

What would the late Michael and Janet Middleton – who served with the Coldstream Guards at Normandy and MI6 respectively – have made of their ultra-private home becoming a nightclub?

“James’s granny was quite a party person,” she says, “she loved a party. I think she would have had a hernia about investing so much money in creating a party venue actually in the house, but it’s a very different world and we’ve got to make the house work today.

“Instincts were just very different in that era. We can only do what we think best at the time, and you can’t judge previous generations on what they thought – they were doing the best they could. I hope other generations down the line won’t be horrified by what we’ve done.”

Next in line is their eldest son Tom. At the beginning of the nightclub project, he “definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with it – he was 15 and he was saying, ‘Mummy, why are you getting more people into the house?’ But now he thinks having a nightclub in your basement is quite cool.”

He will, eventually, take over Birdsall but his parents are putting no pressure on him, instead encouraging him to go and do exactly what he wants to do beyond his ancestral home.

“We’ve told him that if he really doesn’t want to come back to Birdsall we can get someone to come and run things here for him. It shouldn’t be a burden around his neck,” says Cara.

Though now is a better time to be in charge of a historic house than when Guy Middleton inherited a century ago, it is still not an easy life.

“We constantly feel like we’re on a wobble board, always feeling our way, but it’s a privilege,” says Cara. “Hopefully James and I can put a mark down and say that we’ve made a success of something at Birdsall, and helped it continue into the 21st century.

“You don’t think about that on the day you walk up the aisle, but that’s the deal, and Birdsall is a pretty special place to be involved with.”