The Museum

The Museum is a summerhouse built around 1750, with additions from the mid to late 19th century. It is traditionally attributed to the architect Sanderson Miller and is designed in an ornate Gothick style. The building is a single storey and features a string course with a tassellated fringe. It has a large central bay flanked by two smaller bays, all recessed beneath moulded ogee arches that spring from clustered columns with moulded bases and capitals. Each corner has buttresses, each with a double niche and a finial. The left and right sides have pointed glazing bar sash windows with intersecting tracery. The central doorway and flanking windows also feature glazing bars arranged in quatrefoil patterns, with all three openings having ogee arches on clustered columns with palmette capitals. Above each bay arch is a rose window, with the central one being larger, and below the other two are blind panels containing two cruciform fleurons. At the rear, there are two pointed windows with Gothick tracery, a central late 19th-century external chimney stack, and a mid-19th-century semi-octagonal turret at the left corner with blind pointed loops; originally, there were niches at both rear corners.

Inside, the interior retains Gothick plasterwork on the south and east walls, and to a lesser extent on the west wall, featuring niches and blind arches with cusped intersecting tracery and crocketed ogee arches, along with a frieze of fleurons and reticulations. There is a fireplace in the centre of the north wall, flanked by a pair of banded marble columns on either side of a four-centred arch. Although traditionally attributed to Sanderson Miller, this attribution has been recently challenged by Dr. T. Mowl, who suggests that Henry Keene may have been the architect.