The Wallace Collection is one of London’s great treasures. Housed in Hertford House, a grand yet intimate Marylebone mansion, it combines the richness of one of the UK’s great art collections with the subtle pleasure of meandering through a building that still reads as a home. It is somewhere I have returned to again and again with my own children, precisely because it feels human in scale, full of surprises, and at ease with itself.

The collection is remarkable – encompassing European paintings, decorative arts, furniture, and arms and armour – but it is the setting that makes the experience so distinctive. Few other museums in London feel this effortlessly complete. It has none of the bloated expansionist energy of other major institutions, nor the self-conscious theatricality of more recent museum designs.

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