The fact that forty koi would arrive halfway through our interview was not the intention, but Dr. Ann Kaplan enjoys serendipity and loves animals.
Kaplan and her husband, Dr Stephen Mulholland, both 63, also didn’t plan to buy a Grade I-listed castle on the Kent coast. “It just happened,” she smiles.
Kaplan, a mild-mannered multimillionaire entrepreneur (and gluten-free vegan), starred on The Real Housewives of Toronto opposite Mulholland, who made his own fortune as a plastic surgeon. With their eight children out of the house, the Canadian couple was looking for a London retreat to add to their double-digit real estate portfolio.
What’s more, they both qualified for residency, thanks to Kaplan’s English heritage and Mulholland’s Irish. “I wanted to enjoy life in England and not be domesticated,” Kaplan says. “I’ve been raising kids for 30 years. You cook dinner, work full-time, take piano lessons and guitar lessons and karate, watch basketball games and terrible piano concerts.”
They began their search for a place in Belgravia and Mayfair — Kaplan is fond of Nobu and picnics in Hyde Park — but were shocked by the price tags. “It’s very, very expensive. The cheapest one was £8.5 million, plus this £4,000 a month concierge fee,” she explains. “So it’s £48,000 a year in maintenance plus your taxes, plus you’re buying a place, plus you’ve got to decorate and buy crockery and all that stuff.”
It was 2022, interest rates were getting iffy, and Kaplan was starting to think it wasn’t a smart investment. “We’re not going to buy a house that might go down in value,” she says. “I have a PhD in finance, and it’s not like you can turn a blind eye to what’s happening with consumer mortgage rates.”
She began to broaden their property search. “I thought, I wonder how much a castle in England costs. I started Googling, just out of curiosity.” Lympne Castle came up, a large historic fortified manor house in Kent, complete with turrets and 130 acres. But when she emailed the estate agent, he told her it had been sold. “Then he emailed me back six weeks later and said the deal was off. So I said to my husband, let’s go look at this castle in Kent.”
A 1,000-year-old castle with 20 bedrooms and an asking price of £11 million wasn’t exactly the low-maintenance pied-a-tierre they wanted to buy, but Kaplan had a vision. “We have 11 properties,” she says. “We buy them like someone would buy art.”
Banks wouldn’t give them a mortgage for such an unusual property, and the couple’s residency status prevented them from using credit to finance the purchase. “We realized we had to pay cash,” she says. “We came in and saw the castle, and offered 50 percent of whatever the last offer was as a cash offer that day.” The sellers initially balked. “They called back and accepted that night.”
This turned out to be just the beginning of the story.
In November 2022 they conducted an investigation and when the report came back in February 2023, it was not good news.
“It was a disaster,” Kaplan recalls. “The roof, the plumbing, the electrics, the boilers, the dirty drains. There was no Wi-Fi, everything had to be replaced.” They lowered their original offer again, in a classic case of gaslighting. “I said, OK, but I want a million off because I have to do the place up. I didn’t mean to be mean.” Their offer of £5.5 million was accepted, and they now own an English castle just an hour from London.
Renovating a historic home was a monumental undertaking. Although Kaplan and Mulholland have properties all over the world (in Hawaii, for example, there are regulations about coconut palms), they had never taken on something so old and so protected. The restrictions of English Heritage were a shock.
“What do you do when you realize, out of sheer naivety, that you can’t change anything about the castle? You can’t hang a picture, because you have to make a hole in the wall,” Kaplan says. “We have to come up with solutions.”
Kaplan began obsessively researching the history of the medieval castle. The first castle was built in 1080 for the Archdeacons of Canterbury, near a Roman fort. “I don’t like old Roman ruins,” she sighs. “You can’t put a spade in the ground, because those ruins are protected.” The Archdeacon ran the show until 1860, when it became a more modest farmhouse and fell into disrepair.
In the early 20th century it was bought by F.J. Tennant, and the noted architect Robert Lorimer oversaw the restoration, adding the west wing. An east wing was added by the next owner, Henry Beecham.
During the Second World War it was taken over by the military and used as a lookout tower to monitor V1 rockets fired over Calais and alert the coastguard.
Post-war history has certainly been more cheerful. In 1978, Sir Paul McCartney recorded part of his Wings album, Back to the Egg, in the Great Hall of Lympne Castle, beneath the stained glass windows of the four elements.
With hundreds of years of history to preserve, any repairs required experts, and some rooms were filled to the brim with junk left behind by previous owners.
There were holes in the floor that could only be repaired with the same old wood, so the planks from one room had to be sacrificed to make room for the rest. “Now they’ve given us permission to get the same wood from somewhere else,” says Kaplan. “English Heritage is starting to realise that some things are just impossible to fix and have a functioning business.”
Kaplan, a consummate businesswoman, didn’t want to be the boss of her fancy castle all day long. Instead, she picked up where the previous owners left off, running the place as a wedding venue and guest house, plus a restaurant and bar that welcomes visitors on public open houses. The couple is also about to film a reality docuseries about their adventures restoring and running the castle.
Kaplan, who also trained as an interior designer, is determined to put her own unique stamp on Lympne Castle. “I have good taste, or eccentric taste,” she says. “It wasn’t like I was just going to throw a lick of paint on it and leave it at that. I want the place to look absolutely beautiful.”
Visits to the royal palaces have provided inspiration. “HRH has been very kind to me, inviting me to see what goes on behind the scenes and helping me source materials.”
She also purchased and restored vintage and period furniture, incorporating pieces with a sense of humor based on the heritage of the setting. The ornately carved wooden chairs in the restaurant and great hall are a mix of originals and recreations made for the set of the TV show The Handmaids Tale, which Kaplan had reupholstered in mismatched harlequin.
Her search for quality bedding for the King’s Room, where Henry VIII once stayed, led her to that most British of institutions. “It’s from Marks & Spencer,” she confides. She’s a big fan of the food hall because it’s where she gets her favorite dish, green beans, which she likes to rinse in bottled water.
Now that the interiors are coming together, Kaplan and Mulholland can take a moment for lunch in the grounds below the turret, enjoying the breathtaking panoramic views across Romney Marsh to the sea. “I would have to argue with the Crown and say this is really our country, because the ocean used to come right up to the castle,” she muses. “I could write a letter to the King and ask him back.”
But first, there are those 40 koi to introduce to their new home. An algae bloom has covered the surface of the lake, and she wanted a natural and sustainable solution. Kaplan has koi in her other homes, including an inland river at her Hawaii home, and she hopes they will live long and happy lives feeding on the algae.
Kaplan, dressed in a ball gown and heeled boots, walks across the steep sheep field below the castle to a lake to free the sheep. Mulhullond, a devoted Instagram husband, documents their release for posterity.