Montacute House - National Trust

The architecture is Elizabethan in the particular, assured way that means the design is doing multiple things simultaneously and making it look effortless. The Long Gallery on the upper floor is fifty metres of window — or near enough. The tall windows flood the space. The wooden floor reflects the light back up. Standing at one end of the gallery you're inside something that was designed to show off how much glass the owner could afford. It still works.

What the camera found at Montacute was the leaded windows and their shadows. In the stairwell, a lattice window casts diagonal shadows across the pale stone wall. The leading creates a pattern on the stone, specific and seasonal — the angle of November sun catching it right, making the wall a surface for geometry. The leaded greenhouse panes in the garden wall do something similar with the ferns behind the glass.

Outside, the Ham stone balustrade along the terrace has decorative finials at intervals and the terrace pavilion with its domed roof at the corner. The stone is the same colour as a good autumn afternoon, which is not a coincidence. The Elizabethan builders understood the local material. The main house facade is symmetrical, four-square, the fenestration regular, the whole thing sitting in the grounds with the settled quality of something that has always been there.

The tree fern in the walled garden: monumental fronds radiating from a dense russet trunk, the scale of it wrong for Somerset in the best possible way.

The avenue of trees approaching the house from the park — bare in November, the house visible between the trunks — ends where the gravel begins.