The National Trust at Lacock wanted help to bring the place to life a bit. It's a beautiful set of buildings, ranging in age over many hundreds of years, and to tell the history, they looked to the memoirs of Matilda Talbot to tie the main stories together.
Matilda was the granddaughter of Henry Fox Talbot (who invented an early photographic process) and wrote her memoirs in her bedroom. We started here and projected a quote onto the wall from a projector hidden in a travelling case, and hid a CD player simply playing the sound of the tyepwriter on the desk.
Subtlety was used elsewhere, but in the dining room, we turned it back to how Matilda used it - as a dance room. To create a strong atmosphere in here, we used music, rotating shadow lights and a large, illuminated dance floor.
There was some nervousness about how visitors would respond, but there was a lot of positive feedback in the visitor book, including a word that had never been seen in there before: 'fun'.
