Osterley Park

Listen for a moment. Gravel crunches underfoot, and somewhere over the trees a plane drops toward Heathrow. Beneath it, very faintly, runs the low hum of the motorway. Yet in front of you stands a square house of warm red brick, with a pale stone portico and four corner towers topped with small domed turrets. Sheep or cattle may be grazing in the fields nearby. This is Osterley Park, a country estate that the edge of London has wrapped around without ever quite swallowing.

The story here begins in the Tudor age. In the sixteenth century, the estate belonged to Sir Thomas Gresham, one of the great merchants and financiers of Elizabethan England. Gresham founded the Royal Exchange in the City of London, a trading hall for merchants. Out here in the countryside he built himself a large brick mansion around a central courtyard. That Tudor house is still present. It sits beneath the eighteenth-century surface you see today, like an old frame inside a new picture.

Queen Elizabeth the First visited Gresham at Osterley. A charming story is attached to that visit, but treat it as legend, not record. According to the tale, the Queen remarked that the courtyard would look better divided by a wall. Gresham, wishing to please her, sent for workmen in the night. By morning — so the story goes — a new wall stood across the court. Nobody can prove it happened. But it tells you something about how far a courtier might go for a royal guest.

After Gresham, the estate passed through several owners. Early in the eighteenth century it was bought by Sir Francis Child, a goldsmith and banker in London. His bank, Child and Company, became one of the oldest banking names in the country. For the Child family, Osterley was a country retreat close to the city. It was also a display of wealth. Money from Fleet Street paid for nearly everything you are about to see.

In the 1760s, the family brought in the architect Robert Adam. Adam was a Scottish designer who had studied ancient Roman buildings in Italy. He came home with a new, lighter idea of classical style — delicate plasterwork, slender columns, soft colours, and decoration taken from Roman ruins. At Osterley, he did not knock the Tudor house down. Instead, he transformed it, room by room, over many years. The work continued for roughly two decades.

Look now at the front of the house. The most dramatic change Adam made was to open up the old courtyard on one side. In its place he set a great double portico, a covered porch held up by tall Ionic columns. Ionic columns are the type with scroll-shaped tops, like rolled paper. Walk up the broad steps and through the columns, and you arrive in the old courtyard. The Tudor plan is still there, but the entrance now feels like a Roman temple.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Look up at the ceiling of the portico. Adam did not leave it plain. He decorated it with delicate painted and moulded patterns, so that even the space between outside and inside was designed. That was typical of his approach. He thought about every surface — ceilings, carpets, door handles, furniture. At Osterley, many rooms show this unity. The pattern on a ceiling is often answered by the pattern in the carpet below.

Inside, each room has a different personality. The entrance hall is cool and grey and white, with niches holding classical statues. The Eating Room is light and elegant, with chairs placed against the walls, as was the custom when dining tables were brought in only for meals. The Tapestry Room is lined with rich woven hangings from France, warm in pinks and reds. Then there is the Etruscan Dressing Room, perhaps the most unusual space in the house.

The Etruscan Dressing Room is covered in painted decoration in black, terracotta and cream. The Etruscans were an ancient people of Italy, before the rise of Rome. In Adam's time, people believed many painted Greek vases found in Italy were Etruscan, so the name stuck. The figures and borders on these walls copy that vase style. It is a fashionable eighteenth-century fantasy of the ancient world — and it feels surprisingly modern even now.

The house praised itself through its visitors too. The writer Horace Walpole, a famous collector and critic of the time, toured Osterley in the eighteenth century. He described it as a palace of palaces, and few guests disagreed. Later, the estate passed by marriage to the Earls of Jersey. In the middle of the twentieth century, the family gave the house and park to the National Trust, the charity that now cares for it.

A second surprise lies in the twentieth century. During the Second World War, early in the conflict, the park was used to train volunteers of the Home Guard. These were local defence units formed when invasion seemed possible. Men learned practical fighting skills here, among the lawns and trees of an elegant country estate. It is a strange image — wartime drills taking place beside a house built for refined dinners and Roman-style decoration.

When you go outside again, take time for the grounds. There are lakes, long walks under old trees, and pleasure gardens with flower borders. Adam's elegant semicircular garden house sits among the planting. Near the house, the stable block is worth a look too. It is one of the clearest survivals of Gresham's Tudor estate, with older brickwork and a simpler shape. Compare it with the main house and you can see two centuries side by side.

Before you leave, stand for a moment and look back at the portico. The red brick holds the Tudor merchant. The pale columns hold the banker's ambition and the architect's dream of Rome. Above you, the planes keep coming in, and the motorway keeps up its steady sound. Osterley has always sat close to the busy life of London. Notice how the trees and the water still keep that noise at a little distance as you walk away.