West Wycombe Park House

West Wycombe Park House stands near the village of West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Built between 1740 and 1800, it was designed as a pleasure palace for Sir Francis Dashwood, a libertine and dilettante of the 18th century. The house is a long rectangle with four columned and pedimented façades, three of them theatrical in style. It reflects the progression of 18th-century British architecture from early Palladian to Neoclassical, though its design contains anomalies that make it unique. The mansion sits within an 18th-century landscaped park filled with small temples and follies that act as satellites to the house. The park and its structures were conceived to complement the grand design of the estate. The house is architecturally important because it captures a period when young men returning from the Grand Tour built country houses to display their art and learning. Sir Francis Dashwood, the 2nd Baronet, inherited the estate in 1724 and transformed his father’s simple house into a classical edifice after his own Grand Tours. The house is often described as one of the most theatrical and Italianate mid-18th-century buildings in England, with façades that replicate classical villas and temples of antiquity. The west portico, completed by 1770, is the earliest example of Greek Revival architecture in Britain, inspired by the Temple of Bacchus in Teos. The east portico, designed by Roger Morris, reflects Palladian influences from the Villa Rotunda in Vicenza. Visitors approach the house along a drive that first reveals the west end, which appears as a Grecian temple with its eight-columned portico. The principal façade on the south front features a two-storey colonnade of Corinthian columns on Tuscan bases, topped by a central pediment. The ground floor entrance leads into the main hall, a departure from Palladian tradition where principal rooms were usually on the first floor. The north front is more severe, with eleven bays and Ionic columns supporting a pediment. Inside, the house still serves as a home for the Dashwood family, though it is owned by the National Trust and open to the public during the summer.