A La Ronde

On our way to Lyme Regis for the half-term break, we stopped at a National Trust property called A La Ronde. It was built in the late 18th century for two spinster cousins, Jane and Mary Parminter, upon their return from a European grand tour that lasted 10 years. They incorporated items from their tour in the decoration of the house.
The sixteen-sided house was based on this Byzantine church, San Vitale, in Ravenna, Italy.
The last descendant of the cousins now lives in Canada. These are Inuit dolls from Canada.
It was full of amazing trinkets from all over the world.
These items were as small as my finger.
The cousins did a lot of decorative paper cutting and made elaborate pictures.
They also loved shells and made amazing pictures all from shells
as well as a fragile shell-encrusted gallery, said to contain nearly 25,000 shells.
We were amazed at the decoration in the main reception room. "The extraordinary interior decoration includes a feather frieze from many species of birds, including game birds, fowl, jays and parrots, laboriously stuck down with isinglass." (NT brochure) Isinglass is a paste made from dried fish bladders.
These are feathers!
Needless to say, these ladies had A LOT of time on their hands, but they were also very creative!
Here are some other pretty pictures inside and outside of the house.
View of Exmouth (or possibly Exeter) from the upstairs bedroom
I would love to wake up to this view everyday.
The wonky floorboards pieced together to fit into a sixteen-sided house
My kids love to dress up, even as the Parminter cousins.
A way olde bar of Fairy soap
I use different forms of Fairy brands to wash our clothes, in the dishwasher and as dish liquid.
There was a table with drawers labeled ABC, DEF, etc. There were three mistakes: the above drawer with the U and V juxtaposed, and the omission of the letters J and Z. J was missing because in Latin, I replaced J in spelling. We see that all of the time on old gravestones. The Z was missing because X replaced Z in spelling and also according to our guide because there were no English surnames beginning with Z. I like our explanation better.
The shell gallery is at the very top where you see a railing. We were not allowed up there. You could peek upstairs through the doorway (previous photo) or look at it via CCTV.There is a plant like this in our back garden. Ours is potted and is about chest high. This one was at least 15 feet high, maybe 20'.
This ladybug says, "It's Spring!"
It was a fun visit and we are off to Lyme Regis. More on that another day...