The great chamber of one of Wales’ most important historical houses is to be opened to the public for the first time in its present state, following a painstaking two-year restoration.

The Grade I listed Gwydir Castle’s great chamber will open on April 1, allowing people to see what would have been the Llanrwst building’s main entertaining room during the Tudor period.

Owners Peter Welford and Judy Corbett have worked with Cadw to restore features including the chamber’s two-storey Elizabethan porch, sandstone windows and ironwork.

Mr Welford, an artist who bought the near-derelict Gwydir Castle with his writer wife in 1994, said: “My wife and I have devoted ourselves to this house. It has been a 20-year restoration project so far.

“For my wife it’s like having a lover, and for me it’s like having a mistress.

“It can be like living in the past and it does have the reputation of being haunted, which luckily doesn’t bother me.”

After the great hall, the great chamber would have been the second most important room in the medieval Tudor castle.

Before the restoration, Gwydir’s great chamber had fallen into a perilous state of disrepair.

Mr Welford said: “The restoration was painstaking. You have to be extra careful because of its Grade I listing.

“We are reopening on April 1, and I’m looking forward to people seeing the great chamber.

“With help from Cadw, we’ve reinstated the lime plaster and the fine two-storey Elizabethan porch.

“We’ve also restored the sandstone windows to what they would have looked like in 1580, and restored the ironwork.

“The great chamber would have been the main entertaining room during the Tudor period.

“I also spend a lot of my time tracking things down which used to belong to the house, so it’s furnished as authentically as possible.”

Gwydir Castle and its 10-acre garden, which is also Grade I listed, were established by the Wynn family in about 1500.

In the 1570s, Gwydir was home to Katherine of Berain, cousin of Queen Elizabeth I, and the castle has associations with the Babington Plot of 1586 and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Other historical figures linked with the castle include Lord Leicester, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, Bishop Morgan, the translator of the first Welsh Bible, and Archbishop John Williams, Lord Keeper under Charles I.

Gwydir is a fine example of a Tudor courtyard house, incorporating re-used medieval material from the dissolved Abbey of Maenan.

In 1996, Mr Welford famously tracked down Gwydir’s 1640s panelled dining room to New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

It had been bought in a sale in 1921 by American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who planned to install it at San Simeon, his mock castle in California.

In 1926, Hearst bequeathed it to the museum, and it languished for decades in a warehouse in the Bronx before returning to Gwydir after two years of negotiation.

Mr Welford said: “We try to keep the castle as it would have been during Sir Wynn’s day. Even the cobwebs stay.”

Gwydir Castle is open daily (apart from Saturday and Monday) from 10am until 4pm. For more information, call 01492 641687.