This is one of the stranger NT houses I have visited so far, there is nothing wrong with it and it didn't have a bad feel about it. It didn't have any feel about it at all actually, it is a very sterile house. The interior, or that which we get to see, has been immaculately and laboriously restored, the gold is vibrant and the wall fabrics shimmer, the paintings are many and beautiful(a mixture of family portraits and religious stories). Room after room, the beauty on this Grand Tour seems never ending.

One NT volunteer was particularly helpful in pointing out the hidden doors within the bedroom walls and the bathrooms, long since blocked up, but photographs were available. Although the bathrooms were last refitted relatively recently in the 1920's I would liked to have seen them. The only bathroom related object was this bathroom cabinet. There is a photograph available of what this piece of furniture looks like open, a small bowl for washing, a commode and shelves. Portable ablutions.

The seating I found around and about this house turned out to be my Kedleston attraction, there are a lot of seats. The volunteers talked a lot about how the house was meant purely for entertaining, and showing off and never really for living in, one said 'You could live in a shed at the end of the garden, this place had to be kept perfectly, for the parties' perhaps this explains the seating a bit.

The exterior of Kedleston Hall is romantic, set within a sweeping green landscape, no formal gardens, just trees dotted about and gentle hills. But the inside, though stuffed full of beautiful art and objects, lacked heart and soul, the impression that it had never been truly lived in. 

Since my visit I have thought about the art within this house rather a lot, the Curzon wives and the unknown ladies and and ruin paintings in particular, so maybe the house continues as a showcase, just as it was perhaps intended.

You can see more pictures from my visit to Kedleston Hall on my Flickr here.

Its funny that in my last post Newly-Weds, Lamp shades & Chandeliers I had started to think about the realness and fakeness of the houses I have been visiting, there has to be an element of staging to attract visitors and help us too see the bits that are interesting  or important to the house, but it has struck me that I have been seduced by much of the staging. The same can't be said of Chastleton House. Preserved as the last owners left it, Chastleton has minimal staging and so has the charming atmosphere of an almost neglected country house.

There are two prize possessions in this house, one is the bible which Charles I used just before his execution and can be seen under glass in the library. The other is a display of Jacobian glass wear which live safely under more glass. The glass wear in the picture above, possibly replicas (it wasn't very clear), are in the dinning room.

The window dressings are wonderful here and they interacted with the incoming light in a way that made this house feel grand and homely all at once and also very, very old. If I believed in spirits or ghosts (which I don't) I would have expected to see ghosts here, I'm sure I would have exited the house and declared 'Oh, yes I could feel them'. Actually, as one of the volunteers was telling us about a past owner who had many, many cats I realised that I had smelt a really strong waft of cats pee while I was in the great hall. (It was probably me, my cat smells pretty bad)

The dressing rooms were a real treat, one of them felt very private and very much as if the last occupant had just left the room, if I ignore the obvious passing of time in the drooping wall fabric and deteriorating timbre. In any case I am back on track and getting to see interesting, once private, spaces.

You can see more pictures from my afternoon at Chestleton House on my Flickr here.

Welcome to Polesden Lacey in Surrey, this house was made infamous by Mrs Greville, her lavish life style, famous guests from the Royal family and Hollywood and endless gossiping. It was also the venue for the Queen Mothers honeymoon. Honeymooning in Surrey seemed a bit odd to me, even in 1923 so I was hoping to be proved wrong with a bit of romance on this NT visit (atmosphere, not actual romance).

This is a beautiful place, the Queen Mother thought it 'delicious' and it is. The views are vast and spectacularly green, the house feels secluded but not isolated and its just really, really pretty. Its homely, which is perhaps another reason the Queen Mother liked it, it seems to suit her personality.

Bathrooms, bathrooms, bathrooms and here I got to see three, a small toilet and sink, a guest bathroom and Mrs Grevilles private bathroom, which was a marble extravaganza, it must have been really cold in the winter. All three were very different but none had a particularly private feel to them.

The gold room was too much for some, but I could have easily had some more gold in my life.  The Tour guide said that this room was used as a sitting room, I'm wonderingg if I misheard, because as much as I loved being in this room, I can't imagine taking afternoon tea, reading a book or having a chat. Watching TV would be out of the question (its just to loud) even with out the display cases full of porcelain collections, silver boxes, jade and tea cups(maybe if the lighting was low) but for parties and generally showing off, this gold and jewel encrusted room would be perfect.

There is a lot of romance here, its in the art collection and the objects from far away places that Mrs Greville collected over the years. I wondered a bit at how she acquired some of it, there was much talk of Marie Antoinette's jewels which found their way into Mrs Grevilles hands. Status and showing off seems like the main motive what with rooms like the gold room stuffed full of shiny things but actually as a collection of objects there is an underlying beauty and romance tying them all together which made it hard for me to be to cynical.

(A lot of the objects on display in the gold room had been placed there by the NT for viewing, so perhaps some of it would have been more evenly distributed about the house. Of course when placed all together the collection is more over whelming and it does make me think about the realness and the fakeness of visiting houses like this)

The paintings at Polsden Lacey are on line here, which is handy because I struggle to stop and note down the titles/artists while I'm on theses visits.

So far during these NT house visits there is usually a thing that grabs me. Its been the bathrooms, or black and white tiled flooring, here it was the lamp shades and the chandeliers. The house is full of them and they are all slightly odd, over the top and a little grotesque in places but very beautiful all the same. I have just been searching for some historical pictures of the interior of the house to see if any of the lampshades are old, they are, which made me feel a bit better about getting really excited about them and taking lots of pictures (phew, I wasn't swooning over an IKEA lamp).

I overheard a tour guide talking to a small group of people on the upstairs landing, I think perhaps they were looking at the signatures in a guest book, I'm  not sure. I was looking at the paintings and only partly listening but inevitably Walils Simpsons name cropped up and so did the well worn comments about 'That Woman' and how so many thought so ill of her right up to the end, that many blamed her for further upsets in the Royal family outside of abdication. While I started to tune into the tour guides comments I started to feel a bit irritated. Possibly because I have got to a particularly horrible part in Hugo Vicars 'Behind Closed Doors' and partly because I have been engrossed in Wallis's story for what feels like ages now with a drip-drip of information   sticking to my brain as I read. Of course there was nothing said that wasn't true, I just felt a twinge of protectiveness. Its the first time that has happened, and I felt a bit silly afterwards.

There are lots more pictures from Polesden Lacey on my Flickr here.