Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Quite remarkably, Horace Walpole (1717-97) was responsible for both the first Gothic novel and the first Gothic house. Or, at least, the first Gothic Revival house. The son of Britain’s first prime minister Robert Walpole, he built his country house near the banks of the Thames in the fashionable neighbourhood of Twickenham, within striking distance of Richmond and Hampton Court palaces. Strawberry Hill was an experiment in affect and effect, an architecture of literature. Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto — replete with ghosts, knights and haunted castles — kicked off a genre taken on by writers as diverse as Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe. The house was an attempt to funnel some of that dark energy into a building. But while the novel was gloomy, the house was bright and jolly, a toy-castle version of the Gothic with the darkness stripped out. Walpole extended and ornamented an existing house in a sugary, wedding-cake Gothick, all crenellations, spiky spires, pointy arches and twisted chimneys. It was a fairytale fantasia of medieval architecture revived as a fun palace — but it became insanely influential. Until then, houses had been built in a classical manner; Gothic Revival architecture was reserved for medieval structures in (rather drastic) “restorations”. Walpole turned it into a “style” for homes. Without Strawberry Hill, Britain’s subsequent landmark houses might have looked very different. Built over a long period between 1749 and 1790, the house is stuffed with heraldic details, fan-vaulted ceilings, mythical beasts, gilding galore and fireplaces that look like they’re made of icing sugar. It resembles a slightly flat and amateurish stage set. But that is because this was the beginning; you can see the language of a new style being born. Not far from Strawberry Hill, on the banks of the Thames, lie some of Britain’s best Palladian landmarks: Chiswick House, Ham House, Marble Hill. What Walpole was doing here in reviving the Gothic was to create something more self-consciously English than the Italianate villas nearby. Although Strawberry Hill looks very much like a rich man’s plaything, the Victorians would pounce on it half a century later. The zenith of Gothic Revival was the Palace of Westminster (1840-76), started half a century after Strawberry Hill was finished, but the style would encompass town halls, train stations, offices and, of course, churches, across the nation and the empire. Walpole was a curious character, described as tall, wan and effete. He was the member of parliament for the borough of Callington in Cornwall, a place he never set foot in. After completing a grand tour with his friend the poet Thomas Gray, author of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, he returned to a life of leisure, avoiding the family home Houghton Hall — a classical house of great refinement in Norfolk — and choosing to live with his mother off Piccadilly in London instead. He remained deeply attached to her but not to any other woman and is thought to have been celibate.Walpole had a printing press at Strawberry Hill, where he published his own works. He also coined the word “serendipity” — and there is something serendipitous about discovering this bright white house in the suburbs of Twickenham, a fantasy of architecture as personal, whimsical and flimsy as a doll’s house and yet as profoundly influential as any home in the country. It is also, incidentally, possibly Britain’s first house museum. Walpole opened it to the public — four visitors per day, no children — 250 years ago. strawberryhillhouse.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
