Waugh and Laura settled into Piers Court, a Georgian mansion of ‘startling beauty’ they discovered during their house-hunting in the winter of 1936/7 (Wu/Stitch 62). Waugh threw himself into ‘prodigies of destruction’, clearing its overgrown alleys and shrubberies. He acquired an authentic Gothic balustrade for the garden, and began collecting unfashionable Victoriana for the house. ‘Ran amok at village shop,’ he records with satisfaction just before his wedding, later telling Diana Cooper: ‘I buy a lot of ugly things. I find I like them best and they are very much cheaper’ (D 420; Wu/Stitch 67). Towards the end of the war, he writes affectionately to Laura of the Yugoslavian sculptor making ‘mud pies’ of his head: ‘It will be a preposterous possession. It is by having preposterous possessions that one can keep them at arm's length. Well I have a preposterous wife have I not?’ (L 198).

Georgian, Gothic, Victorian, keeping things at arm's length – these preoccupations, apparently the harmless eccentricities of a nouveau country gentleman, mark a significant consolidation of Waugh's aesthetic values. From his earliest fiction he had combined a craftsman's concern for the classic demands of elegant structure with his idiosyncratic gusto for exuberant excess. Now these opposing instincts fuelled his acquired expertise in the classic architecture of rural England where he made his home, and the Victorian furnishings he bought for it – the whatnot, the umbrella stand, and the crowded, finely painted canvasses of Victorian narrative art. Newly married, with a swiftly growing family in prospect, he deliberately turned his back on the present, trying for as long as possible to keep the world of contemporary politics at arm's length.

Between 1937 and 1939 Waugh assiduously studied the habits and habitats of his country neighbours, viewing their homes with a narrow eye – ‘Good early Victorian furniture, fine grounds’; ‘commodious, nondescript, very cheap house’ (D 431). He built up a fine antiquarian collection of architectural manuals and schooled himself in the gradations of the classical Orders – Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite. His own journalism followed an equally stately progression from the first essential (‘Laying Down a Wine Cellar’, December 1937) to a eulogy of rural Augustan architecture and its inhabitants (‘ACall to the Orders’, February 1938); a survey of Victorian furniture (‘The Philistine Age of English Decoration’, March 1938); ending with the countryside's current demography (‘The New Rustics’, July 1939).