Private Sightseeing Tours of London

Ranger's House
Portrait of Lady Wernher - The Wernher Collection
Eltham Palace
Eltham Palace Gardens
The Great Hall - Eltham Palace
Red House
Entrance Hall - Red House

Ranger's House

The Wernher Collection is a stunning collection of medieval and Renaissance works of art, all purchased by the diamond magnate and philanthropist Sir Julius Wernher (1850-1912), for whom collecting was a passion. In 2002, his collection came to the Grade I, 18th-century villa Ranger's House (near Greenwich Park) on permanent loan. Arranged within the elegant mansion's early Georgian panelled interiors, the Wernher Collection presents a glittering spectacle - a sumptuous arrangement of silver and jewels, paintings and porcelain. Nearly 700 works of art are on display here. Among them are rare, early religious paintings and Dutch old masters, minutely carved and painted Gothic ivories, finely wrought bronzes and silver treasures, all revealing the virtuosity of the medieval craftsman and the unparalleled quality of Renaissance decorative arts.

Ranger's House was built by an admiral, Francis Hosier, on the hill behind Greenwich, from where he planned to watch ships on the river and dream of the sea. He died in 1727 in the West Indies before he could enjoy this idyll. The exterior is a marriage of a William-and-Mary centre with Georgian wings.

Eltham Palace

A showpiece of early 20th-century design with a fascinating history. This is the only English Art Deco house open to the public, built on a site of great antiquity and joined to a medieval hall. Commissioned by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld and completed in 1936, the house was filled with the latest all-electric gadgets, including audio system, centralised vacuum cleaner and under-floor heating. The exteriors boast fine sculptures by artists little known today (Alfred Hardiman and Gilbert Ledward), but whose works can be seen all over London.

The whole house is a fascinating and eclectic mix of high-style, French-influenced Art Deco, ultra-smart ocean-liner style and cutting-edge Swedish design. The dining room is a tour de force, with pink leather-upholstered chairs, bird's-eye maple-veneered walls in pale fawn and a silver ceiling. It is entered through black-and-silver doors portraying animals and birds drawn from life at London Zoo.

Even more exotic is Virginia Courtauld's vaulted bathroom, lined with onyx and gold mosaic, complete with gold-plated bath taps and a statue of the goddess Psyche. Luxury emanates even from the centrally heated sleeping quarters of the Courtaulds' pet ring-tailed lemur, Mah-Jongg.

Leave the opulent house and you enter the heart of a medieval palace. The Great Hall was built for Edward IV in the 1470s, although the moat is much older. Henry VIII was brought up here as a child. Surrounding the moated and fortified palace are 19 acres of beautiful gardens, with elements from both the 20th century and the medieval period. Features include a rock garden sloping down to the moat, herbaceous borders recreated by modern designer Isabelle Van Groeningen, a formal sunken rose garden, pergola, loggia and 'garden rooms' designed for shade-loving and winter-flowering plants.

Red House

For a Victorian of the Arts and Crafts tendency, an invitation to spend the weekend at Red House in Bexleyheath in the 1860s must have been the hottest ticket in town. Guests escaping the London grime would take the train to the rural station at Abbey Wood, on the newly extended North Kent Line, where they would be met and taken to the house in a crazily painted, chintz-covered wagonette.

After a couple of miles the cart would turn into a lane and then through a gateway in a handsome brick wall. There, in its idyllic orchard and enclosed by lime, oak and horse chestnut, the house "reared up like a miniature Camelot of turrets and steeply crested roofs".

Under its arched porch, the massive panelled front door would open on its wrought-iron strap-hinges and there, waiting with a greeting, would be the young idealist, poet and painter William Morris and his new bride, the beautiful Pre-Raphaelite model Jane Burden.

The weekend would pass in fun and games, bowls on the lawn and serious talk about socialism and social reform around the garden well. There'd be music, perhaps, from the little minstrel's gallery in the first-floor drawing room. Between times there was the house to decorate.

Jane and her sister embroidered wall hangings. The artists Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted tiles and furniture. Philip Webb, the architect, designed table glass and metal candlesticks while a mathematician friend was given the job of painting geometrical ceiling patterns that had been pricked out of the wet plaster.

Plans were made to paint scenes from the Trojan wars up the stairs and a ship of Greek heroes on the walls of the hall below. There was talk of extending the house so that others could live there in what would become a perfect community of artists.

Red House was no ordinary dwelling - it was "more of a poem than a house", a reaction to the ugliness of the industrial age, an expression of a philosophy that urged a return to nature and to buildings that were honest, homely, traditional and well made.

Though modest in size, the house, the first by Morris's great friend Webb, was a red-brick revolution. The design, which the friends had begun to devise on a boating holiday in France, set the domestic style for the whole Arts and Crafts movement, spawning thousands of buildings in unpretentious "parsonage" style and later inspiring millions of tribute semis in the avenues of suburbia.

"Every brick in it," said one critic, "is a word in the history of modern architecture." Because it had such big ambitions pinned to it, Red House is probably the most famous and influential piece of domestic architecture in the country.