Tasteful friends.... last night I dreamt I went to Hall Lane... .

It looks like plastic wedding cake frosting panels glued to the ceilings.

The indoor pool looks like something from the Parsippany NJ Sheraton.

I find the house's original features extremely pretty, OP. However, the modern additions look like something that either a crime lord, a footballer or a trashy oligarch would like. They scream 'I like BIG and SHINY because it's "de luxe"', and they do not match the rest of the hall in terms of architectural style.

Furthermore, the decoration makes everything look like a boutique hotel - lifelessly neutral and pretentiously tacky, all at the same time. It's very Coleen Rooney neo-Victorian brothel, but with a professional decorator's over-studied, sanitized touch.

The gardens are rather monumental and the best part of the house, though.

I thought that too, R2. The rest of the updates work well but the gate and the pool were misses if you ask me. Still. comfortable old house... they really didn't screw with the character of the place. So many of the period English houses I've seen lately have been guts inside... you've got Downton on the exterior and Starbucks meets variegated glass backsplash in New Buildia, CA on the inside.

Doesn't do anything for me, and I don't think the renovation and addition were sympathetic at all.

The Sports Centre wing addition looks like some small town had a big benefactor for a tiny museum, and the blown out angled wall of glass does like something from a Sheraton or chain hotel. Had they made the Sports Centre an entirely separate pavilion connected by a slim hyphen it might have been a better, and certainly a kinder, result, but the owners were worried that teh money they splashed about would go unnoticed. The gut-renovated the life out of the place and made it look like a reconstruction (with a lot of liberties taken) more than a restoration.

The in antis columns that form a screen at the ell of the inner hall and stair hall is the most beautiful bit of the house but I had to find the photo elsewhere.; the entru vestibule is the other lovely detail. The stair is nice but the cast iron balusters and the white and cream color everywhere, including the newly laid stone floor reveal it's in the end standard fare 1830s, without much finesse. The same for the principal rooms that have great advantage in size and ample natural light, but the architecture is spare and subtle (excepting the ceilings) and it's lost in the hotel lounge look; even the library with its panelling—all new it work it appears—is charmless. All the fitted carpets and can lights stuck everywhere in most rooms and the yellow-orangey new millwork, it drags everything down to quite ordinary.

From the aerial view of the house you can see that it has mature trees beyond that what looks like vast stretches of lawn in some other photos, an illusion it seems, but the rooms must have beautiful views with those vast windows and green and trees in all directions.

Pity about the Sports Centre and the heavy-handed, low aspiring renovation.

Scroll down to the Crouchley Lane posting to see a true horror though.

Ha, R6, I saw that, too. It looks like a Macon, Georgia funeral home expanded by turns as Neverland Pederasty Park and Scouse wedding venue.

I get a kick out of homes like the CROUCHLEY LANE horror. It would be fun filled with young mid-eastern princelings and their entourages. Russian, maybe not. Are Russian brats any fun?

I'm trying to square whether Crouchley Lane is Russian or Middle Eastern money. I'm leaning toward Russian. A nightmare in any event.

Wall-to-wall carpeting? Seriously?

Maybe it's in-between - Caspian?