It occupies a palatial country house designed and built in 1889–94 by Richard Norman Shaw, the champion of a renewed academic tradition, for Viscount Portman, the owner of large tracts in the West End of London, in the early version of neo-Georgian style "An approximation to what was later to be called Neo-Georgian", according to Roderick Gradidge, Dream Houses: the Edwardian ideal 1980:49 that Sir Edwin Lutyens called "Wrenaissance", to replace an earlier house, and is set in 400 acres .