estateCountry House Rescue · Season 3, Episode 2 · Aired March 13, 2011
Tapeley Park
Westleigh, North Devon
Still open. It kept its doors open after the show.
What happened after
Italian-terraced gardens and one of the UK's oldest permaculture gardens, open to the public 29 Mar-29 Oct 2026 (Sun-Thu 10am-5pm), with tea rooms and summer outdoor theatre; custodian Hector Christie.
What happened on the show
Tapeley Park had been in the Christie family for something like three hundred years when its owner, Hector Christie, was running the North Devon mansion near Westleigh as a quasi-commune, an unconventional arrangement that was doing little to arrest the building's decline. He called in Ruth Watson to help turn the crumbling house's fortunes around. What made Tapeley unusual was its assets: the estate holds what is reckoned one of the largest William Morris furniture collections in existence, alongside notable gardens including some of the oldest permaculture planting in the country. Ruth's counsel was to stop treating those things as background and start capitalising on them, building a proper visitor proposition around the Morris collection and the grounds so the mansion near Westleigh could fund its own survival. It is a classic case of a house asset-rich and cash-poor, where the fix was less about invention than about persuading an idealistic owner to let paying visitors in to see treasures that were already there.
After the cameras left
Tapeley Park is open and still in Hector Christie's care. As of our latest verification pass the Italian-terraced gardens and their long-established permaculture plot open to the public across the 2026 season, from late March to late October, with tea rooms and outdoor summer theatre rounding out the offer near Westleigh. We fetched the estate's current page directly for the season dates and pricing. One caution worth flagging: the old public domain for the gardens is now a hijacked spam blog stuffing scraped facts around unrelated advertising, so we ignore it and rely on the estate's own current site. The gardens-and-collection model Ruth urged is the one carrying the house, with visitors funding the mansion Hector nearly let drift.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.