Somewhere in the Castle, behind a wall in the Salon, there is a staircase that most people walk straight past. Visitors don’t know it’s there. That’s rather the point. But we know it’s there – and now, thanks to a newly digitised archive, we can show you exactly how it came to be.
The Rateau Archive has been part of the Leeds Castle collection for decades. It arrived quietly, in portfolios gifted by François Rateau, the son of the French interior designer Armand-Albert Rateau – the man Olive, Lady Baillie entrusted in 1926 with transforming Leeds Castle into the luxurious retreat she envisioned. François’s gift, combined with two photograph albums that Rateau himself had presented to Lady Baillie on completion of his work, amounts to something remarkable: a paper record of one of the most ambitious interior design projects undertaken at an English historic house in the twentieth century.
Until now, that record has been accessible only to a handful of researchers. That changes today.
Why It Matters
Rateau’s influence on Leeds Castle is easy to underestimate if you don’t know where to look. Walk through the Inner Hall and glance up at the trio of arches. Step into the Gloriette and look at the courtyard. Notice the iron lanterns. Each of these details carries his fingerprints – and behind each is a story of iteration, revision and creative decision-making that the archive makes visible in a way that no other source can.
The archive includes designs for the ‘secret’ staircase connecting the Salon to Lady Baillie’s private Dressing Room. It includes multiple iterations of iron lantern designs – some crossed out, some refined, some entirely abandoned. There are landscaping drawings for the outdoor courtyard in the Lower Gloriette, annotated drawings for the Tudor façade, and even designs for bridges across the estate grounds. Taken together, they don’t just tell us what the Castle looked like in the 1920s and 30s, they show us how it was decided, argued over and created.
Saving It
In 2025, our Heritage team secured a generous grant from the Rochester Bridge Trust to digitise the archive in its entirety. The project was led by Collections Documentation Officer, Matthew Abel, working in partnership with specialist digitisation company Genus. Before a single item was scanned, the team audited the full collection, improved its housing and brought in an accredited paper conservator to stabilise and repair items that had suffered over the years.
Approximately 200 items have now been digitised – plans, drawings, photographs – and the physical archive has returned to site.
“These aren’t polished, finished designs – they’re working documents, full of crossings-out and revisions, and that’s what makes them so compelling. You’re seeing Rateau think. Digitising the archive means that story is no longer locked away in a portfolio; it belongs to everyone who has ever walked through Leeds Castle and wondered how it came to be.”
Matthew Abel, Collections Documentation Officer, Leeds Castle Foundation
Sharing It
The digitised Rateau Archive is now publicly available to explore via our website – nearly 200 plans, drawings and photographs, free for anyone to access. Whether you’re a first-time visitor to Leeds Castle or a specialist researcher, it’s all there.
And the archive won’t live only online. In 2027 we’ll be bringing it to life through pop-up talks, guided tours and our multimedia guide – so that when you stand in the Salon, or look up at those lanterns, there’s a layer of story available to you that wasn’t there before. If you’d like to be the first to hear when those experiences go live, sign up to our mailing list here.
A Thank You
We’d like to extend our sincere thanks to the Rochester Bridge Trust, whose generous grant made this project possible.
It feels particularly fitting that an organisation with such deep roots in Kent’s history has helped safeguard this chapter of Leeds Castle’s own – and we hope the archive does justice to that investment for generations to come.
Explore the Rateau Archive at https://www.leeds-castle.com/the-rateau-archive/
