Orange Smarty Placeholder Logo

Historic Homes at Christmas

Duration: 3 x 60'

Play Trailer  Play Screener  Contact Sales  Collection: Christmas

This festive series follows two top designers as they decorate castles and stately homes for spectacular Christmas celebrations.

Every year, Charlotte Lloyd Webber (aka The Queen of Christmas) and her business partner Adrian transform historic houses into winter wonderlands that draw tens of thousands of visitors into a fairytale world for the festive season. 

Competition to secure their services is strong and the budgets run into hundreds of thousands. They must all be picture perfect and ready to open at the same time. With each episode following a different transformation, the series transports the viewers to The Wizard of Oz at Castle Howard, Christmas Treasure at Bamburgh Castle and Queen Victoria’s Childhood Christmas at Kensington Palace.

Episode 1 - Castle Howard

Designers Adrian Lillie and Charlotte Lloyd Webber mobilise their top team of Christmas crafters to deck the halls of Britain’s biggest stately homes. With 60,000 baubles, 58 trees, 500,000 faux flowers, 17 miles of fairy lights and 10 shipping containers filled with bespoke sculptures at their disposal, they elevate Christmas into an art form. We follow their work across the year as they plan, stitch, weld, model and glue a festive Wizard of Oz installation at Yorkshire’s spectacular Castle Howard, complete with life-sized Emerald city, Kansas prairie house, Dorothy, a tinman, scarecrow, four witches

Episode 2 - Bamburgh Castle

Under the watchful eye of Senior Designer Dave O’Donnell, the team has just 5 days to install seven treasure-themes tales at stunning Bamburgh Castle, including a golden goose, mermaid’s grotto, Treasure Island, Aladdin’s cave, giant beanstalk and a full sized Jolly Roger; because nothing says Christmas like a skull-and-crossbones – as long as it’s sparkly! 

Episode 3 - Kensington Palace

Taking on a brief fit for a queen this Christmas at Kensington Palace,  the designers have been commissioned to create an installation that marks 190 years since the future Queen Victoria spent Christmas at the seaside. With beautiful floristry, bespoke decorations and a picture-perfect dolls house all being crafted by hand, the team will capture the magical atmosphere of the Princess’s seaside surroundings in 1835. 

And for Team Christmas, 2025 is a season of firsts: not only are they taking on their first royal residence, but they are also launching their own installation, without a client brief to follow. Let loose, they indulge their wildest dreams at the fabulous Chiswick House in London, inspired by the famous 1780 carol, Twelve Days of Christmas, complete with Lords a Leaping and Ladies Dancing, it should be a dream, except for one thing: due to the historic nature of these buildings there is a strict no glitter policy. Luckily the team come up fabulous festive solutions that bring plenty of glitter-free Christmas sparkle. 

For Channel 4

Also in this genre