Richard Broyd Chairman of the HISTORIC HOUSE HOTELS OF THE NATIONAL TRUST to be honored at gala bene
01/07/2011
The Royal Oak Foundation - Timeless Design & Heritage Awards - New York 19th October 2011
Heritage Award Honoree
Richard Broyd Chairman of the HISTORIC HOUSE HOTELS OF THE NATIONAL TRUST to be honored at gala benefit in New York
The Timeless Design and Heritage awards will be presented at the Timeless Design Gala Benefit at New York's Metropolitan Club on October 19. Proceeds will support Royal Oak's Scholarship Fund and the Foundation's work with the National Trust of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Royal Oak's Board of Directors has selected Richard Broyd and the Historic House Hotels Ltd. to receive the Foundation's 2011 Heritage Award. Established in 2010, the Heritage Award recognizes individuals or organizations in Britain and the United States that have substantially advanced the understanding and appreciation of our shared cultural heritage.
Richard Broyd and the Historic House Hotels' three-decade long commitment to the rescue, rehabilitation, and sensitive adaptive reuse of country houses exemplifies the mutually beneficial partnership that can exist between conservation and commercial interests.
Broyd grew up in Sevenoaks, Kent and became a committed supporter of the Trust in his twenties. In an interview with Clive Aslet in The Telegraph, Broyd told of being moved by the Victoria and Albert's "Destruction of the Country House" exhibition in 1974 and of hatching the idea of saving houses by adapting them to use as hotels, which would not only reestablish their economic viability but also preserve their function as centers of leisure, recreation, and sociability. As he stated, "it's all a question of making the past work in the present."
In September 2008 the National Trust received its single largest donation since World War II when Richard Broyd gifted his interest in the Historic House Hotels group. This was the culmination of three decades of discussion between Broyd and the Trust, starting when he acquired the first property, Bodysgallen Hall, a Grade 1-listed medieval manor in North Wales, in 1980.
That year he also purchased Middlethorpe Hall, an elegant red brick William and Mary country house near York, which had been a night club for a decade before that. In 1989 he opened his final hotel at Hartwell House, a Grade 1-listed Jacobean and Georgian house near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, which had been the residence in exile of Louis XVIII of France from 1809 to 1814.
Broyd's donation of the three Historic House Hotels properties to the National Trust in 2008 is one of the most magnanimous and creative contributions to the Trust and the preservation of the heritage of the British country house in the last century.
ENDS