– until Christopher Hussey debunked the myth in 1927, largely based on the assumption that the south wing was completed in 1680, when Jones would have been dead for 20 years. The most noticeable similarity between Jones's documented work and Brympton d'Evercy is the use of alternating triangular and segmental window pediments, but Jones only ever used this motif to give importance to the windows of the piano nobile, for at Brympton d'Evercy the alternating pediments give both floors equal value. The piano nobile at Brympton is most unusual in being on the ground floor. It is doubtful that a master architect who had designed for the Royal family, and the highest echelons of the aristocracy, would have considered such a placing. Also typical of Jones, but a common feature of the time, is the balustrade parapet hiding a hipped roof. However, the greatest architectural clues that suggest Jones had no hand in the design of the mansion are basic ones: the architect of Brympton d'Evercy gave the façade 10 bays, which means the windows begin with a segmental pediment and end with a triangular one, and no master architect would have permitted such an affront to balance. Finally, as the house is of ten bays, it has no central focus: this is not an architectural crime, but what is such is that the South front in its centre has a focal point: a drain pipe sited there since the building's completion. The evidence would suggest that the South facade was inspired by Hinton House, at nearby Hinton St George, the childhood home of Sir John Posthumous Sydenham's wife, completed in 1638. These two houses, along with Long Ashton House, were probably designed and built by the same local family of architects and masons, working from drawings by Serlio's treatise on architecture, which had been published in five volumes in London in 1611. Baroque state apartments Whoever the architect was, the new south wing was intended to transform Brympton d'Evercy from a country manor into a grand house. Of ten bays, the two-storied building housed on its ground floor the finest and most lavishly decorated rooms of the house. Known as the state apartments, they follow an arrangement common in houses built before about 1720, where important guests were lodged: a series of rooms in a strict order of precedence. A large bedroom suite or apartment, with all rooms on