The Hunt: Which Desolate, Windswept Yorkshire Manor House Did Heathcliff and Kathy Choose?

An on-again off-again couple look for a home in Northern England

Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff (he uses only one name) have by their own admission a complex, on-again, off-again relationship. They are also maddeningly quixotic.

“We must have gone through a dozen real estate agents,” Kathy said. “We just couldn’t decide where we wanted to live. Or if.”

Still, there comes a time in a couple’s lives when they feel compelled to commit and when Heathcliff returned from America having made his fortune, the pair decided they must have a place of their own – a plan that was made somewhat complicated by Kathy having a husband.

Both Kathy and Heathcliff wanted to remain in West Yorkshire, where they had spent their youth, but their priorities were very different: Kathy was insistent that her new place have a ground-level ballroom, generous closet space (her skirts, she noted, are enormous) and a bedroom handsome enough for a dramatic death scene when that inevitable day comes. (Early, she hoped, while she still had her looks.)

Heathcliff’s tastes were simpler: He wanted an austere, but imposing country house, with an entry hall with lots of space for their two rambunctious mastiff pups, Rip and Mame. and a five-horse stable with easy access to the moors.

“I grew up a gypsy beggar on the dirty streets of Liverpool,” Heathclif said. “It gave me street smarts and a lifelong feeling of inadequacy and smoldering rage, but I prefer the country life. I want a place where I can ride madly across the moors and not see any neighbors.”

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same on that,” Kathy added. “And of course, we need a property bordering the sea, with precarious, rock-strewn cliffs which suggest that our horses could lose their footing at any moment and we could fall to our deaths. That adds a certain frisson to a relationship. As does my being married. We need an extra bedroom for my husband Edgar. It doesn’t have to be big. I never loved him.”

The Three

1) Wuthering Heights. This classic, three-bedroom, 16^th century stone farmhouse house, which Kathy and Heathcliff had coincidentally spent time in in their youth, was perfectly situated, on a windswept, desolate property with acres of moors. The house, with its battered, gloomy lattice windows and oppressive ceilings, was much as it had been when it was built in 1500. (The date, carved over the heavy wooden doors, was still visible.) A forbidding stone wall and iron gate insured that a visitor, lost in a storm, would have to be desperate before daring to intrude.

The house had the privacy the couple insisted upon – it was four miles from the nearest estate, Thrushcross Grange. The attached stable had a large sleeping loft, which Heathcliff could retreat to when he felt particularly disrespected. The kitchen was state of the art, with a pump over the sink.

There was, however, a sticking point. The current owner, Hindley Earnshaw, an alcoholic ne’r do well to whom Kathy was related by birth, insisted that he remain in the house after the sale.

Asking price: £ 55,000, including furnishings and hog butchering equipment.

2) Thrushcross Grange. This magnificent white stone manor house, built and designed by Samuel Goldwyn in 1939, had twelve bedrooms, with an additional eight in the attic for staff. It was set in the middle of a landscaped park and surrounded by walls twice the height of those at Wuthering Heights. A grand ballroom opened onto a veranda and the music room had a harpsichord which was included in the sale. There were two small bedrooms, with pigsty views, on the third floor, which Kathy and Heathcliff agreed would do nicely for Kathy’s husband, Edgar, and his whiney sister, Isabella.

“We’ll never marry that one off,” Kathy said. “Honestly, I think she has a crush on Heathy.”

There was also an immense master bedroom, with en suite chamber pots and French doors overlooking the moors.

“A view to die for,” Kathy said.

Asking price: £ 2,600,000, including household servants, tenant farmers, and gardener.

3) Thrushcross Grange, 2026. This immense manor house, a frank homage to the original, retained many of that estate’s best features: There was a magnificent view of the moors, a large stable, demeaning servants’ quarters, and unsettling music piped in throughout the house.

The striking departure here was color: Arterial blood red, saturating the entrance hall floor and the walls, was a recurrent theme, signaling the opulence, passion and hint of danger, which Kathy – and, it appeared, Heathcliff as well -- required.

“Drive me mad?” Heathcliff whispered to Kathy, midway through the tour, after which the couple asked the realtor if they might have twenty minutes “to explore the house on our own.”

Returning, with Kathy’s cheeks noticeably pinker and Heathcliff’s cravat now on backwards, the pair continued their tour, admiring the estate’s chandeliers, suggestive, over-stuffed sofas, and an entire room for ribbons, which Kathy said she could remake as a walk-in closet.

Most striking, however, was the master bedroom, where the soft, fabric covered walls seemed to echo Kathy’s pale skin.

“Call me crazy,” Kathy said, leaning up against a wall. “But it’s like this wall covering was designed for me.”

She thrust out an arm.

“Look,” she said. “This dot even matches my freckles!”

Price: If you have to ask, you don’t deserve a love that will haunt you and damn you for all eternity.

Which one did they choose?

1) Wuthering Heights.

Kathy loved the master bedroom of Goldwyn’s Thrushcross Grange, insisting that the dramatic view was unmatched by anything they’d seen, and the French Doors were so easy to open it could even be done by a bereft lover carrying his dying mistress.

“You just give it a little poke with your foot,” she said, demonstrating.

But ultimately, Kathy deferred to Heathcliff, who was powerfully drawn to their childhood home, Wuthering Heights, with the contractual promise of the alcoholic owner Hindley remaining on site.

“That louse was rotten to me when I was a kid,” Heathcliff said. “He whipped me, he hit me in the face with a stone, he sent me off to sleep in the stable – which was not renovated the way it is today, with a Queen-sized straw bed and a repurposed horse blanket; it was freezing. I’m really looking forward to giving that creep some of his own.”

“I know we’ll be happy here,” Kathy added.