NUFFIELD PLACE, seven miles northwest of Henley-on-Thames,  was for 30 years home to the richest man in England, William Morris. He was founder of Morris Motors in Oxford, and later became Lord Nuffield.

Built in 1914, the house was bought in 1933 and extended by Morris and his wife. It survives as a fully furnished work of the mid-20th century and memorial to an unostentatious tycoon and philanthropist.

 Morris was born in 1877 and left school at 15. A youthful cycling champion, he set up a bicycle repair business in Oxford with £4.00 of capital. He went on to build motorbikes and then cars, making 400
Morris cars at his Cowley works in 1919. Six years later his annual output was 56,000. With no children, he gave away all the money he made, mostly to medicine and education. The Nuffield Foundation was and still is one of the wealthiest charities in England. The house is held in trust by Nuffield College, Oxford.

The architect was Oswald Milne, a pupil of Lutyens, who built in his
master's "Queen Anne" style. Nuffield was conservative, indeed Edwardian, in taste. The rooms might be those of any comfortable suburban villa, the furniture mostly reproduction pieces from the Oxford firm of Cecil Halliday. The general effect can seem charmless, but the interior is uplifted by mementoes of Nuffield's various interests, notably his love of gadgets and his lifelong passions for
smoking and golf. The house is exactly as he left it, apart from an apparent lightening of the paint schemes.

The hall is filled with long-case clocks, which Nuffield tended and repaired himself.
In the drawing room are Lalique lamps, a radiogram and an ingenious "self lighting match dispenser". Everywhere are models of cars. The upstairs bedrooms are simple for so rich a man -Lalique appears the one extravagance. Lady Nuffield's bed is turned at an angle to give her a view of the garden.

Lord Nuffield's bedroom is the star of the house. It is starkly plain, as if harking back to his simple boyhood in the backstreets of Oxford. The carpet is said to be patched from the floorings of his
cars, and certainly looks it. A suite of cupboards is devoted not to clothes but to a miniature workshop, crammed with do-it-yourself tools, which he used when he could not sleep. Nuffield even mended
his own shoes. He took a tool kit with him wherever he went, including on sea voyages. His Heath Robinson lighting system survives over the bed.

So simple are these rooms that the coronation robes on display in the dressing room come as a shock. Would Nuffield have permitted this
ostentation?