Winter clean at Dunster Castle
- Published:
- 18 November 2024
Closing the house over winter gives us full access to each of the rooms, allowing us to clean these rooms in depth. Full access to these rooms gives us the opportunity to conduct a full inventory and meet the needs of each piece in the Dunster Castle collection. Discover more about the conservation efforts during this period.
Why is the castle closed during the week in the winter?
After a busy open season, departments across the site use this time to complete tasks that are hard to do when open to visitors. Sharing the Luttrell family's home as they wanted it to be seen and ensuring the utmost care of the collection is a delicate balance and the Collections and House Team are busy taking this time to complete necessary conservation work.
How long does it take to clean each room?
A single room can take us anywhere from a couple of days to closer to a month, depending on the size, but the Collections and House Team and Conservation Volunteers typically spend a week in each room, conducting a deep clean from top to bottom.
Book Cleaning and Luttrell Textiles
The East Quantoxhead Bedroom quilt and the Wisteria bedspread are checked and cleaned with a low-suction hoover and a goat hair brush to remove dust, with this process being repeated until the clean is completed. Cleaning the rare leather hangings is more complicated, with the team cleaning obvious cobwebs and dust, but calling specialists in when they are due a deeper clean.
The books in the Library are given greater attention where approximately 1200 books are taken out and dusted individually by our Conservation Volunteers.
Intricate plaster ceilings
We have to build scaffolding to reach intricate plaster ceilings in rooms such as the Library as they are so high. Working delicately, the team use a pony hair brush where possible. For those spaces that are more intricate or the plaster is delicate, such as the dining room ceiling, a low-volume blower is used to remove cobwebs and debris. The Library ceiling alone took 2 and a half days to clean.
Main Stairs and floors
The carpets are cleaned daily during the open season and stair rods are cleaned. Renaissance wax is then applied when needed which is typically every 3-6 months. Before the castle reopens, the team clean and wax the floors of the Inner Hall and Outer Hall to hydrate the wood and help protect it against dirt and wear and tear. After welcoming over 150,000 visitors across the year, some of the carpets need greater attention, such as the Dining Room carpet which is being cleaned by specialists in January.
Dusting
If left over time and combined with high relative humidity, dust will create a dull grey cast over collection items which would eventually need to be removed by a specialist.
While we take great care to dust daily and thoroughly, the closed season allows us to dust in a manner that we don't have the time or space to when open daily to visitors. A full dust is much more invasive than our daily presentation cleans, with scaffolding often being constructed which disrupts the presentation of the room. The team use a different brush for each different material type, with each one having to be washed after every use.