Gregory Gregory's Stately Pleasure Home

Harlaxton Manor has been home to a millionaire Victorian recluse, a face-cream tycoon and an American university

- Lucinda Lambton

Huzzah for Harlaxton in Lincolnshire!

It’s a most marvelous monster of a mansion. The outlandish style and extravagance defy comparison with most houses in the country.

Part neo-Elizabethan and Jacobethan, Harlaxton Manor was blown up by the baroque, with an alarming degree of individual flair and fancy.

It was built by the pleasingly named Gregory Gregory for himself and himself alone between 1832 and 1851. He was helped by three architects, Anthony Salvin – an expert on the faux-medieval; Edward Blore, who completed Nash’s schemes for Buckingham Palace; and William Burn, a pioneer of the Scots Baronial Revival.

Gregory never married, disliked his heir, and never entertained. Instead, he channeled all his energies and passions into the building of his vast palace.

‘Nothing can be more perfect than it is, both as to the architecture and the ornament,’ wrote Charles Greville, who went to watch it being built-in 1838.

Greville explained how Gregory traveled to all parts of Europe ‘collecting objects of curiosity, useful or ornamental, for his projected palace’.

Greville added, ‘The grandeur of it is such and such is the tardiness of its progress that it is about as much as he will do to live till its completion.’

He was right: after ‘embodying himself in his edifice’ for over 20 years, Gregory Gregory was eventually to live in it for only three, enjoying a bachelor existence, with only one bath and over 120 rooms.