Somerleyton Hall

This splendid Victorian house and estate on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk is the focus of a pioneering new conservation project

- NATASHA FOGES

Somerleyton Hall hunkers handsomely in 12 acres of ornamental gardens amid the broad, flat landscape of East Anglia. A Jacobean manor built in 1610, it was elaborately remodelled as an Italianate mansion by the Victorian entrepreneur Sir Samuel Morton Peto, who for years was the biggest employer of labour in the world; his construction firm built many of London’s most famous buildings and monuments, including Nelson’s Column and the Houses of Parliament.

No expense was spared: Peto chose Prince Albert’s architect John Thomas to transform the house, and paintings were specially commissioned for its interior. One of the two towers that dominates the facade has a clock by Benjamin Vulliamy, whose design was originally entered in a competition for the clocktower at the Houses of Parliament (losing out, of course, to Big Ben).