Builder
Thynne supervised Seymour's planned great house on a hill called Bedwyn Brail at Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire, intended to replace his ancestral seat of Wolf Hall. The house was unfinished when Seymour fell from power, but a correspondence survives, dated between November 1548 and June 1549, which shows Thynne directing the plans. He also played a part in the building of Seymour's neo-classical Somerset House in London.
At Longleat, Thynne took thirty-seven years to design and build his own great neo-classical house with four facades, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian pilasters, and regularly spaced bay windows. A perfectionist, he employed only the best craftsmen, including the English master mason and architect Robert Smythson and the French mason Alan Maynard. He suffered a setback in 1567, when there was a major fire at the house. However, during the long process of construction, Longleat became the centre of a new school of building. Smythson went on to design Hardwick Hall, Wollaton Hall, Burghley House, and Burton Agnes Hall, and is described by Mark Girouard in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "the strongest architectural personality to have survived from the Elizabethan and Jacobean age".
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