Eastnor shows up differently to everyone. Sometimes it’s a party venue. Sometimes it’s a home. And sometimes it’s the backdrop for a photoshoot you’re working on for a luxury menswear brand.
That’s the story of Kristian Ferner Robson and Eastnor Castle, anyway. The founder of menswear company Oliver Brown is a friend of the family, and had been coming to Eastnor for years before the idea occurred to him to photograph Oliver Brown’s latest collection here.
‘Normally, you arrive at a location and you’re discovering it through the lens of the shoot,’ he says. ‘With Eastnor, it was the other way around. I knew the house as Imogen’s home first, and suddenly I was seeing all these familiar rooms through somebody else’s eyes.’
The idea was to capture a single day at Eastnor, moving from what the brand calls “estate dressing” – tweed, cashmere and tailoring – into velvet jackets and eveningwear. It required a location capable of shifting register without losing its sense of place. And Eastnor, with its sprawling grounds, richly varied rooms and generations of accumulated objects, could do just that.
‘There was so much variety, but it all still felt connected,’ says Robson. ‘We could move through very different settings without ever feeling as though we’d left the same world. By the time we got to the velvet and black tie, the house felt completely different from where we'd started that morning.’
The progression from country clothing to black tie neatly captures the breadth of Oliver Brown today. But the brand Robson founded in 2000 looked rather different: then, it was a single shop on London’s Lower Sloane Street selling women’s pieces as well as men’s.
He transformed it into a British menswear outfitter built around tailoring, country clothing and formal dress – including more than 1,000 top hats. Robson himself is known as the “king of top hats”, which perhaps explains why Oliver Brown has become a go-to for anyone dressing for Ascot.
Bringing something back from the brink is a story familiar at Eastnor. The castle narrowly escaped demolition during the 20th century and, until the 1990s, many of its rooms were relatively empty and subdued. Its revival has involved deciding what to preserve, but also what to restore, rearrange and introduce anew. It is a balancing act Robson understands.
‘What I recognise is the importance of knowing what to hold on to and what to move forward,’ he says. ‘Oliver Brown has always been about contemporary tailoring, cut in the classic British tradition. We take a lot from that tradition: good cloth, proper construction, getting the fit right and understanding when an occasion calls for a bit of effort. Those things don’t need reinventing every season. But we’re not trying to recreate the past either.
‘Perhaps that’s where I see the connection with Eastnor. It’s very comfortable with its history, but it’s also a living, changing place. Nothing feels as though it’s standing still.’
The castle’s living quality also began to shape the campaign itself. ‘We had a plan, obviously. You always have a plan. Then you arrive and the house starts rather interfering with it,’ Robson says. ‘It gave us the story without us having to force one on it.’
That is perhaps the key thing about shooting, or even just being at Eastnor: the castle may make a spectacular backdrop, but it never feels like one.
‘It’s obviously an extraordinary place, but once you’re inside, it feels very much like a family home,’ says Robson. ‘That’s what I love about it. It’s beautiful, but it isn’t too polished or precious. It has personality. You feel that people actually live there.’