A Day Out

Taking advantage of a break in the monsoons currently lashing London, I went to visit Strawberry Hill villa, not long re-opened after a two year restoration project to rescue it from collapse.

Strawberry Hill villa was built by one immensely rich man -- Horace Walpole -- as a summer retreat to house his vast collection of precious things.

Horace was an offspring of Robert Walpole (the first British Prime Minister whose vast palace at Houghton Hall featured on here a few weeks back). Horace was a, um, bachelor, who never, er, married, and lived "alone". He was also a vastly knowledgeable art historian and aesthete, who loved beautiful things. But there is no historical evidence that he was a Gay. Oh, no.

Being a Walpole, the Saracen's Head device featured everywhere at Strawberry Hill:

He managed to find the last undeveloped riverside land in Twickenham, the most fashionable spot in London to build your summer retreat (in those pre-railway days, it was perhaps a three hour horse ride).

Walpole built his villa in the then emerging fashionable style of English Gothic. And it is as over-the-top Gothic as it is possible to be.

No idea who those people are but they just wouldn't get out of the way and I had other rooms to see -- including the gallery, whose gilded ceiling is in no way over the top:

Leading off it is a strong room in which Walpole kept the most precious of all his precious things -- an extraordinary jewel box of a room:

But light is one of the key things he worked with, not least to show off his vast collection of ancient stained glass:

All that gilding inside -- including here, in the round drawing room -- is designed to sparkle and twinkle, adding more playful points of light:

The restoration is not yet completed, although that, for me, adds to the charms of a visit. Here, the first floor landing of the main staircase, outside the Library, is currently finished in stone-coloured paint:

And I was taken by how Walpole's desire for decoration even spread to the servant's quarters, where this delicious faux-Medieval floor tiling is generously laid:

From Strawberry Hill I toddled over to Osterley to finish the day with a tour of the Adam Brothers' work:

They took a fine Elizabethan house (built four-sides around a quadrangle) and audaciously ripped out most of one side, replacing it with a transparent portico in the Classical style. 

That was standing on the inside looking out, and here's standing on the outside looking up:

As you get closer, the Elizabethan proportions of the house fades and visually the approach becomes pure Classical...

Until you stand underneath and look up at this:

At the opposite side of the courtyard you enter into a cool, grey hall, heavily decorated in best Adam style -- alas, I was unable to get into it on this visit because it was being set up for a film shoot. Here's a peek through the window:

The rest of the state interiors are lush Adam, not really my taste: most of them are a bit fiddly -- like this Etruscan Room:

This drawing room was, by contrast, one of the most lightly-decorated rooms in the state suites:

Yes, quite.

Back outside, the jaunty tower roofs stood out against the blue sky. It had been a good day:

Not quite over, though. On the way home I took a snap of the District line platforms at Paddington station, all soft and poorly focussed.

Luckily I didn't give up, grabbing this delightfully beshadowed shot of the passenger footbridge before the security goons accosted me:

The shadows reminded me vaguely of Horace Walpole's servants' floor tiling.

And so to bed.