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Replacing an existing mantel or chimney piece, or adding one where there was previously none, can immediately change the character of a fireplace.

Downstairs, amid the stained glass, oak paneling and carved stone chimney piece of a Gothic-style sitting room, was a tangerine foot about the size of a small car.

Somebody inside the chimney piece said, “Shh!”

Sitting in the Great Hall of Cliveden House, we took in the ornate oak paneling, Belgian wall tapestries and the 16th-century stone chimney piece, sheltering a roaring fire.

“Conversion,” he wrote to Edward Sackville-West, “is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made.”