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.\u00a0Or, at least, the first Gothic Revival house.\u00a0The son of Britain\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0Strawberry Hill was an experiment in affect and effect, an architecture of literature.\u00a0Walpole\u2019s novel The Castle of Otranto \u2014 replete with ghosts, knights and haunted castles \u2014 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.\u00a0But while the novel was gloomy, the house was bright and jolly, a toy-castle version of the Gothic with the darkness stripped out.\u00a0\u00a0Walpole 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 \u2014 but it became insanely influential.\u00a0Until then, houses had been built in a classical manner; Gothic Revival architecture was reserved for medieval structures in (rather drastic) \u201crestorations\u201d. Walpole turned it into a \u201cstyle\u201d for homes.\u00a0Without Strawberry Hill, Britain\u2019s subsequent landmark houses might have looked very different.\u00a0\u00a0Built 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\u2019re made of icing sugar.\u00a0It resembles a slightly flat and amateurish stage set.\u00a0But that is because this was the beginning; you can see the language of a new style being born.\u00a0 Not far from Strawberry Hill, on the banks of the Thames, lie some of Britain\u2019s best Palladian landmarks: Chiswick House, Ham House, Marble Hill.\u00a0What Walpole was doing here in reviving the Gothic was to create something more self-consciously English than the Italianate villas nearby.\u00a0Although Strawberry Hill looks very much like a rich man\u2019s plaything, the Victorians would pounce on it half a century later.\u00a0The 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.\u00a0Walpole 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.\u00a0After completing a grand tour with his friend the poet Thomas Gray, author of \u201cElegy Written in a Country Churchyard\u201d, he returned to a life of leisure, avoiding the family home Houghton Hall \u2014 a classical house of great refinement in Norfolk \u2014 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.\u00a0He also coined the word \u201cserendipity\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s house and yet as profoundly influential as any home in the country.\u00a0 It is also, incidentally, possibly Britain\u2019s first house museum.\u00a0Walpole opened it to the public \u2014 four visitors per day, no children \u2014 250 years ago.\u00a0\u00a0strawberryhillhouse.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0Or, at least, the first Gothic Revival house.\u00a0The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-97949","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97950,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97949\/revisions\/97950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}