In 1813 England’s great landscape painter JMW Turner built a small villa, Sandycombe Lodge, on a large plot near the Thames at Twickenham. Here, the painter became an architect, guided by the hand of his friend John Soane, notes the home's website.

Now, a $3.5 million renovation has made Turner's country retreat into a tourist destination, even while greatly reducing its size from later additions.

The Guardian adds: Sandycombe Lodge, the country home the artist JMW Turner designed for himself, is once again a very small house. The Victorian extensions have been demolished, the bathroom and other modest 20th-century comforts ripped out, the front garden wall replaced with a simple picket fence – and its front door is now open again to visitors.