One of the finest country homes of the era, Strawberry Hill House was so popular and influential that it gave its name to its own style of architecture, ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’. Incorporating features of Gothic churches into the exterior and interior of the house, architect Horace Walpole combined ecclesiastical features with a castle style including turrets and battlements. Most uniquely, the house was the first to be built without any medieval fabric built from scratch in the Gothic style based on historical examples, thus making a claim to be ground zero of the Gothic revival that defined the proceeding century, according to Rosemary Hill.
The excellent restoration work performed on the house and gardens in recent decades has made Strawberry Hill House one of the most attractive and iconic sites in the United Kingdom. With its striking pale finish, various chambers, castle-like keep and church-like spires, the house allures with a fairy-tale quality whose aesthetic it no doubt helped to create.
The gardens, whose design is steeped in the English tradition, eschews the symmetry and flattening of features found in French gardening, and instead opted to soften the harshness of nature while embracing its spontaneity, with trees and shrubs planted in natural groupings with the philosophy of seeing nature as a garden itself. Rather than seeing a garden as another architectural opportunity to impose order and function, Walpole let the extravagance of nature be self-evident.
Reflecting the eccentric and lavish tastes of its architect, Strawberry Hill House also contains a carved Shell bench, a recreation of the initial Rococo work initially placed at the corner of the estate to overlook the river. A masterfully distinctive and novel piece, the Shell bench has been accurately recreated from a reference point of only two extant drawings, becoming one of the houses biggest landmarks.
As well as a point of interest of architecture historians (and general appreciators of our nations beautiful history), Strawberry Hill House hosts events for all the family. Outdoor performances for kids, flower workshops for budding botanists, Gothic tours for Halloween, and of course, guided tours on selected days. With so many details to unpack, internally and externally, with lovingly-placed additions over a series of decades by Walpole, Strawberry Hill House has endless revisitability, with a guarantee you’ll find something new each time.
Details
- Address:
- 268 Waldegrave Road
- TW1 4ST
- Transport:
- Strawberry Hill