Lord Egerton Castle

There's a particular kind of building that only gets built when someone has too much money and not enough to lose. Lord Egerton Castle is one of those buildings.

It sits in the Njoro area, a few kilometers outside Nakuru, surrounded by canopy trees and the kind of highland green that the Rift Valley does quietly and well. You wouldn't expect a castle here. Then the towers come into view and the whole drive starts to feel slightly absurd, in a good way.

The man behind it was Maurice Egerton, born in 1874 into an English aristocratic family, the fourth Baron of Egerton after his father died in 1920. He came to Kenya the same year, working his way up through Zimbabwe, Congo, and Uganda before settling in the Nakuru-Njoro region, where the British government had given him forty four kilometers of land as a token of post-military appreciation. He bought more from Lord Delamere. He farmed. He hunted. He photographed things. And at forty five, following the conventions of his class, he found himself an Austrian princess of suitable lineage.

He built her a four-roomed cottage first. She came, looked around, spent two hours on the property, and apparently decided it wasn't enough. So he did what any reasonable baron would do and started on something bigger.

Construction began in 1938, modeled on his family's ancestral home at Tatton Park in Cheshire. The architect was an Englishman named Albert Brown. The labor came from Kenya, from Italy, from a team described as Red Indian workers. The rocks were imported. The interior tiles came from China. The green marble for the fireplaces came from Italy. British oak lined the walls and stairways. The roof was dressed in zinc tiles brought from abroad. The only local materials used were kinoo and Njiru stones.

Then the Second World War started and Egerton had to go back to England. He returned in 1945 and kept building. The castle was finished in 1952, nine years after it started. Fifty two rooms in total, including a ballroom, a photography darkroom, a library, a laundry room, a reading room, guesthouses, a master bedroom, a children's room, and a grand pipe organ with four hundred and eleven pipes tall enough to span two floors, played three times a year by a musician brought in from England specifically to perform Egerton's favorite ballads.

The princess was not impressed. She left for Australia in 1954 and married a filmmaker.

Egerton furnished the whole thing anyway, moved in, and spent the rest of his life there alone. After that, women were banned from the property entirely. He reportedly pinned warning signs to trees around the hundred-acre grounds. How seriously the threat was meant is hard to know now. What's clear is that he lived in that castle for years with an organ no one played except on schedule, in rooms built for a life that never materialized, until he died of chest complications in 1958 and was buried in Nakuru.

The castle was declared a national monument in 1996 and opened to the public in 2005. It's managed now by Egerton University, which he also founded. You can walk through the rooms, hear the story from a guide, and stand in a ballroom built for a woman who left before the roof was on.

It is, as far as I know, a popular wedding venue.