In Georgian England, it was customary for members of the peerage to establish a country seat. Thus it was that Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, the English writer, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician, established a taste for Gothic castles in the countryside. He purchased “Chopp’d Straw Hall,” a villa on the Thames in Twickenham, West London, and called it Strawberry Hill House.
From 1747 to 1797, Walpole transformed the villa into Britain’s greatest example of Gothic Revival architecture. There, in the summer of 1764, after waking from a dream in the “gloomth” of his “little Gothic castle,” Walpole began his seminal work, The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel.
Herewith, Luxury Defined proffers a collection of country seats, great and grand, in the Gothic tradition.
Consider Sangeste Castle in southern Estonia, a 19th-century neo-Gothic manor fashioned after England’s Windsor Castle, or Castle Mandl in Córdoba, Argentina, built in the 1920s by an Austrian industrialist once married to Hollywood legend Hedy Lamarr. Or go back to the source, the Middle Ages, to a moated fortress in the Netherlands or a keep in Piedmont, Italy.
Step across the drawbridge beneath the crenellated walls into the magical medieval mysteries of the Gothic—Walpole’s world.