HOW TO BRING THE MAGIC OF HOLKHAM INTO YOUR OWN HOME

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Choose a few places to create big, bold displays, rather than spreading decorations around the whole room, advises Catherine. “You could put a beautiful wreath on the door, and then have key spots within the house where you really go for it.”

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Target all the senses: choose different seasonal fragrances for different areas of your home – the entrance hall, sitting room and kitchen, for example – using scented candles, or natural products such as clove-studded oranges, eucalyptus and sprigs of rosemary.

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“There are so many household objects and it might not occur to you to use them in your Christmas display. You need repetition, so you need a lot of one thing to create a theme,” advises Lady Leicester.

If you have a collection of similar objects, be it vases, jugs, candleholders or even houseplants, put them together on a shelf or mantelpiece and intersperse them with foliage, tea lights and perhaps the odd bauble to make a festive display.

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When you’re putting together an arrangement for the dining table or mantelpiece, think about grouping objects together, and try not to have everything at the same height. “When we’re doing a table setting, we often arrange bricks or boxes down the middle of the table to create different heights, and place candles or decorations on them,” says Lady Leicester.

“It’s nice to draw the eye to different levels.”

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Emulate Holkham Hall’s displays by arranging groups of objects in Christmas-tree formation – for example, Christmas cards stuck to the wall or pinned to a noticeboard.

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To give baubles more impact, remove the metallic or plastic tie and hang them from pieces of coloured ribbon instead. This works particularly well when hanging baubles from mantelpiece garlands, and is

also an easy way to create a colour scheme for the tree.

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When choosing fairy lights, consistency is key. “The really nice lights for table settings are the battery-powered micro ones on copper wires, rather than having strings of lights on black cables – the copper wire really vanishes so you just see the lights,” says Lady Leicester. “And stick with one type of light,” adds Catherine. “If you’re going with warm white, stick with that and don’t let anybody persuade you into the twinkly blue-white ones. If you love coloured lights, go all out – just don’t mix it up.”

™ Unless you have an enormous dining table, there often isn’t room on the tabletop for decorations at Christmas. A frame over the top of the table is a creative way to add wow factor – a hanging rail that can be clamped to the sides of the table can be picked up online from Amazon from about £20. “We used a camera backdrop stand for the dining table display in the Moss Room,” says

Catherine. “We wound faux foliage around it to disguise it, and hung some tree decorations from it; we didn’t laden it with too much. It’s fun and you can use it year-round. It would look lovely on an outdoor table in summer with lanterns hanging from it.”

™If you want to hang decorations from walls or ceilings but lack fixings to tie them to, try damage-free adhesive fixings such as Command hooks or similar (available from hardware shops), which can be stuck to the wall or ceiling and removed when the decorations come down. ™ Should your Christmas tree turn up looking a little thin and straggly, build it up by attaching extra fir branches or sprigs of faux foliage with cable ties. An alternative, says Catherine, is to go large with decorations: “Even if it’s a small tree, if there’s a bit of a gap between branches, get some big baubles and hang them to fill that hole, and tie ribbons around the fixing on the bauble for extra impact.”