To those accustomed to the graceful Palladian villas of so many 18^th century aristocrats, Strawberry Hill might come as rather a shock. Taking medieval tombs and church doorways as your inspiration and deliberately aiming to make rooms as gloomy as possible, is certainly a different approach. No wonder its fragile, sickly creator woke up with nightmares. One of them was his inspiration for the first English Gothic Horror novel, ‘The Castle of Otranto’.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797), its creator, was the youngest son of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He was known especially for his collections of art and antiquities, for his novel, and for his forty-eight volumes of Letters to various friends and relations, which are a mine of information about aristocratic society in 18^th century England. And for his weird tastes in interior decorating …

Young Horace sat as an MP in the House of Commons. His father’s influence got him a number of undemanding but well-paid posts. In 1748 he acquired a small plot of land beside the Thames in fashionable Twickenham, and in 1749 started converting the existing house into an over-the-top summer residence. During the winter he lived at number 11 Berkley Square in Mayfair, which is still a very up-market area. Fortunately, due to his influential papa, Horace was rich enough to indulge his taste for trompe l’oeil, papier mâché imitations of stone mouldings, and Flemish stained glass imported at vast expense.

I was a little startled by my first sight of it. It is anything but symmetrical, and outside it is covered with odd towers, turrets and battlements, and barley-sugar chimneys, but I soon decided it was charming, although I still prefer Marble Hill House.

My personal favourites among the rooms are the library and the gallery. In the library, the bookcases have pierced Gothic arches based on a feature in St Paul’s Cathedral. I am totally amazed by the gallery, which has a papier mâché ceiling and canopied recesses, with gilded, white-painted imitation fan-vaulting. When I saw it, it was spectacular, flooded with sunlight. It is hung with magnificent paintings, not, unfortunately all the originals of those on display there. Sold off to meet family debts in 1842, these are now widely dispersed, although efforts are being made to reassemble them. The paintings throughout the house are a mixture of those owned by Walpole, such as ‘Catherine de Medici and her Children’; some, like the Munz painting of the house in the Red Bedchamber, are on loan from other museums and art galleries; and some are facsimiles, such as ‘The Ladies Waldegrave’, which is actually in the National Gallery of Scotland. But it gives a general idea of what the house looked like.

Stranger touches include a slanting asymmetric doorway into the library, which guides the eye towards the (umpteenth) gothic fireplace, and sliding wooden shutters at all the windows because Walpole didn’t like curtains. He thought they got in the way of the beautiful stained glass and the carefully chosen views of the landscape surrounding the villa. He collected china and miniatures, medals, and odd things like Cardinal Wolsey’s hat and King William III’s spurs. His appearance wearing a wooden cravat to meet his guests seems even odder. It was intricately carved from limewood by Grinling Gibbons (the original cravat is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Twickenham was a fashionable place, in the 18^th century and his house became something like a modern tourist attraction, as indeed it is today. On trend, he found over-tourism to be a problem; as time went on, he complained that he was getting too many visitors.

Walpole never married, and was somewhat effeminate in appearance. He had no children outside marriage either. There has been much speculation about his sexual orientation; we shall never know for sure. General opinion was and is that he didn’t have much interest in close personal relationships of any kind, although he had many friends both male and female. In spite of his poor health (he had gout and rheumatism for many years) he lived to be 79 years old and died a natural death. At the age of 74 he had inherited the title of Earl of Orford from his elder brother’s son, who died without a male heir.

When he died in 1797, the property passed briefly to his cousin, Mrs Damer, and in 1811 by entail to the Waldegrave family. Both Walpole’s niece and great-niece had married into the Waldegrave family. It was sold by the Waldegraves to the de Stern family in 1886, and by them to the Catholic Education Council, who still own it, in 1923. The house is leased to the Strawberry Hill Trust and is open to the public. Unfortunately, the 7^th earl of Waldegrave was a spendthrift with no artistic tastes who sold off Walpole’s collection of antiquities in 1842. Fortunately, Walpole had published a detailed catalogue, so we know what was there originally. There is now a Strawberry Hill Collection Trust which exists to locate and if possible, return objects from Walpole’s collection, and to advise on the care of those still at the house.

Perhaps one shouldn’t visit Strawberry Hill on a sunny May Day with an old school friend, friendly guides and a large number of obviously harmless tourists. It didn’t really have a sinister atmosphere. But I can see that at midnight during a thunderstorm, with the floorboards creaking and a draught blowing your candle out (in the 18^th century there would definitely have been draughts), it would be easy to imagine a mighty apparition appearing at the head of the stairs to deliver a threat of awful doom…