The music accompanies them up the drive, heard then unheard with every bend, every opening in the trees. Raisa glimpses a glitter of glass, a grey roof, a scrap of scrubby parkland, a gleam of water: Brightbourne is a coy house. Lorien directs the Volvo down a right fork at a stone arch that opens onto a yard of decaying outbuildings. The car swings around an elbow of rhododendron, and there it stands, a three-storyed, generously windowed seventeenth-century box with thuggish additions: a Georgian ballroom annexe leaning against the east wing as if wheedling a loan; a massive Victorian port cochere above the front door, ludicrous as a black eye. Shy of grandeur but strong boned, Brightbourne leans back into the close-shouldering woods. The arrangement of the windows with the outsized covered porch gives the house a look of permanent surprise, that it has been discovered at mischief after four hundred years.

Ian McDonald, Hopeland p113

Man alive—“leaning against the east wing as if wheedling a loan”, that’s just SO good.