In the second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell introduces Stourwater Castle, the fictional country home of the Lord Beaverbrook-esque business magnate and government minister Sir Magnus Donners. Arriving by car on a warm September morning in 1928, Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, muses on the sight before him: “Here was the Middle Age, from the pages of Tennyson, or Scott, at its most elegant: all sordid and painful elements subtly removed.” For Jenkins, the combined effect of the cobbled quadrangle, manicured gardens, and tapestry-lined Great Hall is somehow disconcerting. Donners’s precisely restored pile is too full of genuine antiques to be a Hollywood set, but too perfect to reflect its real history.

Save for its Georgian origins and cliff-top location, Kingsgate Castle, near Broadstairs in Kent, might pass for Stourwater. Begun as a whimsical castellated stable block for the nearby Holland House in 1762, Kingsgate had fallen into ruin by the time it was purchased by John Lubbock, first Baron Avebury, in 1901. Enchanted by the remains of this Gothic folly, Avebury commissioned the London architect William Henry Romaine-Walker to rebuild it over the next eleven years into a luxury residence, replete with a gatehouse adorned with the family arms and a garage wing for a fleet of motor cars. Yet, as Timothy Brittain-Catlin notes in his excellent recent book, The Edwardians and Their Houses: The New Life of Old England, the restoration of Kingsgate retained an