Cragside

One of the books that I found in going through the living room shelves at 20 was a 1957 - 1st edition! - copy of Pevsner's Buildings of England: Northumberland - which of course came with me. 

He had Views about Cragside - built by Norman Shaw for William Armstrong (in whose town house, now a hotel, I'm currently staying): "The site is Wagnerian and so here is Shaw's architecture.  It has none yet of the finesse of his Chelsea houses of a few years later. Its origin is the Tudor style both in its stone and its black-and-white versions. The Northumbrian hills are not a black-and-white region, but that did not worry Shaw in 1870." 

There are some stunning late C19th domestic interiors - this big living room has stained glass built on Rossetti designs, and then, in the dining room, there are William Morris windows representing the four seasons.

The bedrooms range from cosy,

to grandiose, with owls on the bedposts.

The whole place ran on hydraulic power, including the dishwasher (Armstrong was, of course, an engineer) - and made a fortune through (post the Crimean war) making guns and battleships for the world - not just the Empire, though he did plenty of that, and trains, too.

He had a large art collection - though the good stuff, including Turners, Constables, and Millais's Cill October - were sold by his heir in 1910 (he ran through money very quickly).  There's lots of stuff - especially mawkish stuff - by Henry Emmerson, who was good at churning it out;

but also, and rather surprisingly, John Bell's A Daughter of Eve - A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic (1862) - later inevitably called the African Slave.  He sold guns to both sides in the Civil War.

What I absolutely hadn't known was his experiments with electricity (he corresponded with Faraday) and indeed, recorded the patterns made by electrical sparks on photographic plates.

And the grounds were magnificent - huge tall pines; endless rhododendrons; a formal garden (this mechanism measures the sun - a bit of a joke, today); two fern gardens, and a pretty garden gate.