Nigel Watts
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I visited Strawberry Hill yesterday, Horace Walpole's famous 18thC gothick villa in Twickenham which has recently been taken over by a Trust with the intention of taking it back to its appearance in the 1790s.
It was much smaller and stranger than I expected. Its strangeness is not helped but the loss of much of its context. In 1790 it was in the countryside, set very close to a lane to its north with substantial grounds to the south and views of the Thames to the East. It was later extended when a detatched service block was joined to the main villa by a later and more conventional gothic revival structure and the whole reclad in stone coloured stocco to unify it. Later still the extended villa became part of a vast range of institutional buildings extending further south forming a catholic university college, the road has been moved further north and the view of the Thames is obscured by suburban development. The original and very exotic and valuable collection of furniture and objects it originaly housed were sold off in the mid 19th C.
The original villa has recently been rerendered externally, mainly in a kind of pebbledash, and limewashed in white giving it a wedding cake appearance and immediately setting it apart from the adjoining buildings. It looks very odd but this it seems, it how it would have looked in Walpole's day. Ever odder is the North entrance front, once right next to a lane but now set back from the road behind a large lawn and sweeping drive. This front looks like a jumble of different domestic buildings which might have been quite picturesque from the perspective of the original lane but which just looks muddled and crowded from the present road.
The interior is what made the house justly famous but it's rather forlorn, stripped of all its contents bar a couple of pictures and a mirror. The Trust is trying to get more of them back or copies made. An architect friend I was with observed that it reminded him of John Soane's house (now museum) - another very personal creation of an obsessive collector. The gothick decor is much more Georgian in spirit than Victorian but the sequence of spaces in the rather rather muddled plan, the contrasts between small and large, dark and light are much more irrational and Romantic than one would expect from an 18th century building. For example one small unornamented space between the staircase landing and the corridor leading to the state rooms had very dark green glazed walls in high gloss lit by window containing mainly blue stained glass - quite extradorinary.
The main state rooms with their gilded fan vaulting and scarlet damask walls are justly famous, but I prefered some the smaller spaces such as the little hexagonal closet and the octagonal room where he kept some of his most treasured posessions.
Its certainly worth a visit and the cafe does good food and cakes. It's given me some ideas, but I am not quite sure how to execute them in my house.
It was much smaller and stranger than I expected. Its strangeness is not helped but the loss of much of its context. In 1790 it was in the countryside, set very close to a lane to its north with substantial grounds to the south and views of the Thames to the East. It was later extended when a detatched service block was joined to the main villa by a later and more conventional gothic revival structure and the whole reclad in stone coloured stocco to unify it. Later still the extended villa became part of a vast range of institutional buildings extending further south forming a catholic university college, the road has been moved further north and the view of the Thames is obscured by suburban development. The original and very exotic and valuable collection of furniture and objects it originaly housed were sold off in the mid 19th C.
The original villa has recently been rerendered externally, mainly in a kind of pebbledash, and limewashed in white giving it a wedding cake appearance and immediately setting it apart from the adjoining buildings. It looks very odd but this it seems, it how it would have looked in Walpole's day. Ever odder is the North entrance front, once right next to a lane but now set back from the road behind a large lawn and sweeping drive. This front looks like a jumble of different domestic buildings which might have been quite picturesque from the perspective of the original lane but which just looks muddled and crowded from the present road.
The interior is what made the house justly famous but it's rather forlorn, stripped of all its contents bar a couple of pictures and a mirror. The Trust is trying to get more of them back or copies made. An architect friend I was with observed that it reminded him of John Soane's house (now museum) - another very personal creation of an obsessive collector. The gothick decor is much more Georgian in spirit than Victorian but the sequence of spaces in the rather rather muddled plan, the contrasts between small and large, dark and light are much more irrational and Romantic than one would expect from an 18th century building. For example one small unornamented space between the staircase landing and the corridor leading to the state rooms had very dark green glazed walls in high gloss lit by window containing mainly blue stained glass - quite extradorinary.
The main state rooms with their gilded fan vaulting and scarlet damask walls are justly famous, but I prefered some the smaller spaces such as the little hexagonal closet and the octagonal room where he kept some of his most treasured posessions.
Its certainly worth a visit and the cafe does good food and cakes. It's given me some ideas, but I am not quite sure how to execute them in my house.
