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The estate office William Waldorf Astor built to be safe in, carved with Musketeers, Arthurian heroines and fifty-four gilded heads.
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Astor left America for England in 1891, in part because he feared his children would be kidnapped, and in 1895 had John Loughborough Pearson - the Gothic Revival architect of Truro Cathedral - build him this on the Embankment: an estate office with rooms to live in and somewhere secure to keep his books, instruments and art. It is Portland stone throughout, early Elizabethan in manner, and the weathervane on the roof, by the metalworker J. Starkie Gardner, is a model of Columbus's Santa Maria.
The interior is the reason to come. Thomas Nicholls carved the characters from The Three Musketeers onto the newel posts of the staircase. Fifty-four gilded portrait heads by Nathaniel Hitch look down from the Great Hall, historical figures and fictional ones side by side. George Frampton made nine silver-gilt panels of Arthurian heroines for the doors into it. Mahogany, marble and cedar throughout.
Sun Life of Canada had it, then a body of accountants, then Smith & Nephew, whose lion still appears on the radiator covers. A flying bomb damaged it in 1944 and it was repaired between 1949 and 1951. Since October 2011 the Bulldog Trust has opened it as a gallery, showing collections from museums outside London that rarely travel - a house built to keep one man's things to himself, spending its old age showing other people's.
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