Landmark Trust is changing rooms Could some such change be on the way? Over the last seven months, the Trust has welcomed both a new chief executive, Anna Keay, and a new chairman, Neil Mendoza, and as a further portent comes a very impressive project at Astley Castle, near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, which opens for rental in July. Its past is rich and resonant. Dating back to the 12th century, inhabited by three English queens (including Lady Jane Grey) and Civil War Roundheads, it was variously added to and subtracted from over the centuries. In its long slow decline, Astley Castle was known to George Eliot when she was a girl on the neighbouring Arbury Estate: she pictures it in Scenes from Clerical Life. Requisitioned during the war as a convalescent home and then turned into a hotel, it was gutted by fire in 1978 and then pitilessly stripped and vandalised. English Heritage duly listed it as one of the most endangered sites in Britain, but until the Landmark Trust proposed a radical solution, everybody havered as to what do to about it. Yet bringing Astley back to life represents a significant departure from the Trust's usual procedure: for the first time in its annals, it has not only rescued and restored a building but creatively contributed to it, too. Witherford Watson Mann, a relatively young practice, has designed a generously proportioned two-floored apartment within the ruin: downstairs are four bedrooms and bathrooms, upstairs a magnificent great hall for cooking, eating and sitting and talking. Outside its high, wide windows, looking over a quiet rural landscape, the poetry of the past is left, as it were, intact - birds nest in the eaves, the moat is stagnant and lushly weedy, Tudor arches and roofless medieval walls remain in their serene melancholy. You are in the very heart of England. What is so invigorating is that the effect of Witherford Watson Mann's scheme is neither that of an ostentatious modernist intervention nor a sentimental bit of ye olde Poundbury pastiche. It neither contrasts nor complements; it doesn't pretend to be old or claim to be new, and you couldn't call it an annexe, either. It looks just like an organically evolved episode in the long history of the house. Astonishingly, the cost of the project came in at under £2.5 million. Whether the interior furnishing and decoration will show a similar freshness of imagination at work or just be kitted out in standard Landmark style, I can't yet tell you: when I viewed the building last month, walls hadn't yet been painted or curtains hung. But I was so excited by what I saw that I went straight home and booked Astley for a friend's birthday weekend in February: I can't give it a higher recommendation than that.