The Music Room had been well known for years as a building in distress, but nothing could be done because it had other buildings hard up against it on all four sides. On our first visit we had to reach it by walking through the toy warehouse of which it formed a part. We had to buy all these buildings and demolish them (a long job) to give the builders access.

It seems to have been built in about 1730 as a garden pavilion, but its surroundings have long been overlaid with streets. In the nineteenth century it became part of a stained glass factory. When we arrived it had a temporary roof and many broken windows. Most of the plasterwork had fallen, but luckily almost all of it was in the building.

We turned the loggia into a shop by glazing the central Ionic arch and removing an inserted floor; it did not seem sensible to leave this large space lifeless and empty in the middle of a town. In front, a lively pedestrian square had sprung up.

The plasterwork of the music room itself took 6,000 hours of work to repair. It is an exceptional Baroque interior, where you may now sleep as well as play the piano. On the walls are the muses: eloquence, history, music, astronomy, tragedy, rhetoric, dancing, comedy and amorous poetry; with Apollo over the fireplace. A fruitful goddess with a torch presides over the ceiling. One muse had vanished entirely and was recreated by the plasterers from Sutton Coldfield as a modern girl, big and busty, with a cheerful eye; she makes an excellent muse of dancing.

In the attic above, reached by a narrow stair, we made a flat. From it and from the small terrace on its roof there are distant views over Lancaster, including a fine view of the Castle from the sink; and at all times, waiting for you to enter it, there is the stillness of the music room below, both full and empty at the same time, as is the way with rich interiors. Lancaster is a fine town, with many things worthy of attention, not least Rennie’s monumental aqueduct on the Lancaster Canal, bridging the River Lune like a vestige of imperial Rome.

View our history sheet for this Landmark

Sleeps: 2+2