Make your life more royal (part two of a series) - Decorating your castle

Part of the reason I set up this blog is to help people "put a little royalty into their life". To that end, I'm kicking off a semi-regular series of postings about bringing the castles of Europe to you, sort of. Similar to the "Gothic Homemaking" series of videos that were put out by Aurelio Voltaire (over on YouTube), this will be a recurring series on how to make your own life, well, a bit more royal.

Part one of this series can be found here. 

One way of doing that is by taking the old adage, "A man's home is his castle," a bit more literally - and this is true whether you're a man, a woman, or anything else. While you can buy literal castles over in Europe (sometimes for less than what a house in Toronto, Canada will cost these days - see footnote), many of us aren't on that sort of budget, or can't relocate to Europe easily. So, absent a rich relative suddenly leaving you their fortune, let's see how we can "work with what we have" in terms of decorating your living space. We're not focusing on furniture today - that will be another post later. I'm talking about other adornments and accessories that will make it clear this is a palace, not a studio apartment.

Also, I'm not talking about spray-painting everything with gold paint or covering it all with gilt leaf and calling it a day. Frankly, that looks ugly and gauche.

Fortunately, as I write this (summer 2025), the retail stores near me (particularly the discount retailers like Marshall's) are just starting to enter "Code Orange", meaning they are starting to get their Halloween stock in. Who knows what sort of candelabras, wall sconces, and other quasi-gothic housewares - err, castlewares - you'll be able to pick up?

I picked these bat wall appliques up in the post-Halloween sales last year!
(Yes, I haven't used them yet - I sometimes buy things
without knowing exactly how/when they will be used.)

If your royal treasury is flush with gold, there are some very nice things to be found in the online shop of the Royal Collection, a registered charity in the UK that administers "almost the entire contents of all the royal palaces" (which are not owned by the current monarch, but held in trust by them for the future). By purchasing from them, you'll be supporting their efforts to preserve British history.

However, even if you're on a budget, there are things you can do/make/buy to "royal up" your castle. First, never underestimate your local second-hand stores - you can often find amazing things that other people have discarded. I found these pewter plates at our local "Value Village" a couple of years ago, complete with the hardware to hang them on the wall:

Pewter plates from a second-hand store

Some of your thrift store finds might need a bit of work, but it's amazing how a fresh coat of paint (again, NOT gold!) or refinishing can make something look new again. (On the other hand, having things that were already "well-loved" can also lend them a bit of authenticity.)

Similarly, check out local garage sales, etc. I don't have them any more, but I once found two wall plaques at a garage sale, each of which had two miniature (steel!) swords tucked behind a coat of arms.

Don't forget about Amazon wish lists! Amazon has lots of nice "royal" home furnishings such as statues and wall plaques, swords, and even chainmail and helmets, so if you build a wish list and share it to your friends and family, they can buy you things off of it for your birthday or other occasions!

Speaking of online shopping, you can check out the "fast fashion" websites like Temu, although the quality is often uneven, to say the least. And check the sizing on those sites - a 6" banner won't look that impressive on your wall!

You can find surprising things at dollar stores, too! The lion wall plaque at the left of the photo below came from a dollar store (and the portrait on the wall behind it was another find from the local "Value Village").

Royalty is where you find it...

Something you can do that's pretty cheap and easy to do is to find pictures of gargoyles online, print them out, put them in cheap frames from the dollar store, and hang them above your doors, stairs, etc. If you already have 8.5x11" document frames around the house, it'll only cost you the paper and printer ink/toner!

Framed gargoyle picture from the Internet.
Note the "Queen's Chambers" sign in the background

If you have some spare fabric lying around, or you can pick some up cheap, you can always hang it from the walls as a ceiling-to-floor drapery.

Also remember to look for inspiration in "castle-adjacent" things - in that last picture, you can also see a "Queen's Chambers" sign hanging up, near the bottom of the photo. I found that at the Michael's Arts & Crafts chain store as part of the Bridgerton-inspired collection they released last year.

Footnote: Yes, I'm serious about a castle in France costing less than a house in Toronto - I recently saw a listing for a castle in Ax-les-Thermes, France, with five bedrooms selling for $633,800 USD, or about $870,000 CAD. At the time of writing (July 2025), the average price for a detached house in Toronto is about $1.4 million CAD. So, you could buy the castle and still have enough left to furnish it, for what you'd pay for a house in Toronto.