“I don’t think it went down too well with all these people around the world,” the Prince said, with a smile. “I get told by lots of people ‘oh I knew so-and-so’ and ‘I wanted to buy this that and the other’.”
The Prince has appeared in a new BBC Alba series Great Estates, exploring the conservation of Scottish stately homes including Dumfries House.
He told the programme of the “labour of love” to preserve the house and its contents, admitting it had been an “appalling risk” to take on in hindsight.
He had helped to coordinate a £45m deal to buy the 250-year-old estate from the Marquess of Bute, after realising it was a “special” property at risk of having its unique contents divided up and sold off piece-by-piece for millions of pounds.
Some of the restored furniture Photo: BBC Alba
It is said to contain around ten per cent of the entire surviving Chippendale items in the world, with many of them valued and designated for sale in London. One expert estimates one chair was worth £1.4m, while a bookcase could have fetched up to £20m.
The Prince said: “”If we hadn’t stepped in and saved it, then all this wonderful furniture – not only Chippendale but two of the great Scottish furniture makers as well – would have literally gone everywhere.
“We would have been left with, I think, a completely empty shell of a house.
“I thought ‘oh God what are we going to do’? Anyway, by the time the negotiations and all the horrors of putting the money together and God knows what was finally concluded, there were three huge pantechnicons already with furniture loaded, all with labels on, all going down to London.
“They literally were stopped on the motorway at 1 o’clock in the morning and turned around to come back.”
The furniture as it was packed up to go to auction Photo: BBC Alba
He added: “Most of these chairs and so on would have gone for two, three, four times more than the estimate probably. Each chair might have gone for half a million to a million.
“Now at least people can come and see what to all intents and purposes is an 18th century house still almost as it was.
“It’s been a bit of a labour of love to try and restore everything.”
Eight years on, Dumfries House now boasts an outdoor centre, artists’ retreat, hospitality training centre, traditional craft workshops, a cookery school and vegetable patches for children to learn about the land.
The Duke and Duchess of Rothesay walk around the estate
Describing why he had felt the house needed to be saved”, the Prince said of the alternative: “Somebody would have bought it and said they had great ideas for golf courses and things and it would never have worked.
“It would have joined the list of yet more derelict country houses.”
“One of the reasons why I also thought it was also worth taking this appalling risk and helping to plug the gap between all the other funding possibilities was that I wanted to try and see if that the same time as saving the house I could try and make a difference to the local area.
“I’m one of those people who rather likes taking on the most difficult challenges.
“I’m absolutely convinced that through heritage-led regeneration you can achieve an awful lot.”
Prince Charles shows the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge around Dumfries House
The programme detailed the difficulties faced by experts along the way, including furniture and carpets stained by nicotine and cigarettes burns from a previous inhabitant, traces of the family dogs in living quarters and a strange smell they had battled to get rid of.
It also shows the Prince meeting the young people who have benefited from the educational schemes, pontificating with schoolchildren over whether his own love of brussell sprouts has developed with age.
“In the end, hopefully, it will be somewhere really interesting for people to come and walk around,” he said, joking he would love to see its progress “if I’m still alive by then”.
The programme was the first of four episodes of Great Estates, broadcast in Scotland on BBC Alba and available on iPlayer.
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