Just a short train ride from London is Osterley Park, an Elizabethan house turned neo-Classical masterpiece. It has some of the most complete (and truly magnificent!) Robert Adam interiors I have ever seen. Because the house was used so infrequently over the years ~ and then primarily as a place to entertain ~ it has retained much of its Adam interior decoration. The 18th-century pleasure grounds are still accessible, and dotted with delightful follies. See more here.(photos: a detail of the portico ceiling, and an unruly dill weed in the Elizabethan garden)
When future president John Adams visited Osterley Park he wrote that "temples to Bacchus and Venus are quite unnessessary as mankind have no need of artificial incitements." KDM
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