When, in the late 19th century, Ludwig Messel bought a house and 600 acres of land at Nymans he promptly commissioned the fashionable architect Ernest George to extend the existing early 19th-century villa with a huge conservatory and an Italianate tower. The influential gardening writer William Robinson encouraged Messel to create a garden, which he did, beginning in 1895. The present house was built in 1928 in the style of a late medieval manor house by Colonel and Mrs Leonard Messel as a replacement for his father’s Victorian villa. In the winter of 1947, the house caught fire. Although the rear section of the building was rebuilt, the remainder was left as a roofless walled ruin, its high, mullioned windows left glassless and gaping. Paradoxically, this disaster gave the garden an architectural centrepiece of romantic antiquity.
There is a collection of tapestries; 17th century furniture; a Flemish painted panel of Christ blessing the children; drawings, sketches and photographs of the family (including Norman Evill's sketch of the house and a dramatic self portrait of Lord Snowdon).
