Nicola here. Back in the mid-18th century there was only one fashionable place to be if you wanted a “villa” on the River Thames (a villa in these terms being something roughly the size of a large country house to the rest of us.) That place was Twickenham, a village half-way between the two royal palaces of Richmond and Hampton Court and with the improvements in both roads and carriages, a mere two hours’ drive from Central London. It was here in 1747 that Horace Walpole, the son of England’s first Prime Minister, bought a house that he referred to as a “plaything” and a “bauble” that was to be his summer residence, Strawberry Hill House. Even the name suggests hot summer days and fruit growing wild on the hillsides!
These days Twickenham is a busy suburb and it takes less than an hour to drive between the town and the centre of London. Gone are many of the imposing villas beside the Thames, although a few are still around, and the old houses are often surrounded by the new. Horace Walpole’s little Gothic Castle is still there, though, even if we didn’t see any wild strawberries growing on the hill during our visit.
Strawberry Hill was originally called “Chopp’d Straw Hall” and Walpole kept the original building, which had been erected in 1698, and remodelled the inside 
and extended it. In creating his Gothic castle, he was inspired by the idea of visitors encountering surprises as they travel around the building – “serendipity” was his word for this, whether it was stepping into a grand gallery or a dark chamber lit only by jewel-bright stained glass.
These days you enter the house via the gift shop and from there step into the hall, but in Walpole’s time the entrance was via the grand front door. The hall is deliberately gloomy, lit by just one candle in a black japanned lantern which immediately creates a rather “gothic” feel, added to by the suit of armour on the stairs, the stained-glass windows and the cathedral-style staircase. We’ve all read those books where the heroine creeps downstairs alone at night when she hears a strange noise in the library; this is a house where you can totally imagine that happening, except that the gorgeous library is actually on the first floor! Here there are cunning arched bookshelves that open outwards so you can get at those books on the top shelves.
Walpole in fact gave himself nightmares with the decoration of Strawberry Hill, dreaming on one occasion that an enormous mailed fist emerged from the suit of armour and came crashing down. It was his inspiration for his novel “The Castle of Otranto,” which was known as the first Gothic novel and the founder of the Gothic horror genre. I could picture Horace working away at his desk in the study by the light of one candle, scaring himself with his own imagination!
Walpole was quite fixated on Henry VIII and in the Holbein Chamber is his tribute to the Tudor world, containing a series of 
portraits of members of Henry VIII’s court. This was a bedroom and you could hop into your fourposter behind the screen, in the hope that all those Tudor faces watching you wouldn’t keep you awake all night!
No country house is complete without a long gallery, of course, and the one at Strawberry Hill is just like a Disney-imagined fairy tale! There’s an awful lot of gilding; One visitor described it as “all gold and crimson and looking glass” whilst Walpole himself said “I begin to be ashamed of my own magnificence…” Needless to say, he wasn’t really. Horace was completely over the top and very happy to be there.
The house became very famous in Walpole’s day. All his aristocratic friends and plenty of other people wanted to see this fairy tale house by the river. Walpole would take tours of people he was interested in, leaving his housekeeper Margaret to take the hoi polloi – who were expected to pay a guinea per visitor. After a while Walpole got fed up of the number of people wanting to visit and organised a system of group booking from May to October, no more than 4 people a day and no children(!) He was way ahead of his time in terms of organising heritage tours! Even so, he was very annoyed at the vulgar quality of some of the people, especially those who damaged the furniture and ornaments, and even broke the bill of his Roman eagle statue and stole the broken piece!
Walpole was a great collector, of course, and loved oddities as well as historical artefacts. His collection included china and ceramics, portraits and paintings and also such items as Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat, although he was apparently outbid when he wanted to buy Oliver Cromwell’s night cap. His parties were also legendary. On one occasion he greeted his guests at the gate, dressed in an elaborate cravat based on a Grinling Gibbons carving and a pair of gloves embroidered up the elbows that had belonged to King James I. There was music and banqueting, card games and drinking in the gallery illuminated by a thousand candles. Even the sheep and cows on the estate were chosen to match his garden planting schemes.
Horace Walpole died childless in 1797 and the house passed to a cousin and to the Waldegrave family. It is now run by a charitable Trust and has recently 
been restored. My favourite room was the green parlour. You were instructed to go into this very dark chamber and stare at the dark green wall until it looked black. Then you had to look at the blue window and experience "an immediate sensation of cold seep through your veins." Spooky! I don't know whether Strawberry Hill is supposed to be haunted - it would be appropriate for a Gothic house - but it would be easy enough to imagine it was if you were staying there after dark. When the fog rolls up the hill from the Thames in the autumn it is apparently quite a creepy place! Luckily we saw it on a summer day, enjoyed an ice cream in the garden and then wandered back into Twickenham along the river. It's difficult these days, amid the noise and traffic, to imagine how peaceful and rural it would have been back in the 18th century but it's nice that visitors can still see the little icing-sugar castle in all its glory!
If you were planning a party house, what would be your essentials? Horace had his gilded ballroom, his Gothic library and his Tudor portraits; I'd have a book nook for reading parties (!) and a big garden pond! What would make your party perfect?
