from a tall donjon, or keep, containing the family rooms, through the main block built around the earlier house, to the service wing and the stables. Simon Jenkins draws comparisons with Windsor, Arundel and Eastnor. Haslam, Orbach and Voelcker, in their 2009 volume Gwynedd in the Pevsner Buildings of Wales series, describe it as "one of the most enormous houses in Britain" and note its "wholeheartedly Romanesque" style. Coflein records that Hopper and Dawkins-Pennant selected the Neo-Norman, or Romanesque Revival style, as opposed to the increasing fashionable Gothic Revival. Pevsner describes the castle as "a serious work of architecture", noting the "dauntingly fine masonry" construction. Hopper designed all the principal interiors in a rich but restrained Norman style, with much fine plasterwork and wood and stone carving. The castle also has some specially designed Norman-style furniture, including a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria when she visited in 1859. The diarist Charles Greville recorded his impressions after a visit in 1841: “a vast pile of a building, and certainly very grand, but altogether, though there are some fine things and some good rooms in the house, the most gloomy place I ever saw, and I would not live there if they made me a present of the castle”. Some modern critics have been similarly unimpressed; in his study The Architecture of Wales: From the First to the Twenty-First Centuries, John B. Hilling describes the castle as “nightmarishly oppressive, a most uninviting place to live”. Thomas Hopper (1776–1856) made his reputation as architect to the Prince Regent for whom Hopper designed a conservatory in the Gothic style at Carlton House. He was a versatile architect, whose dictum, "it is an architect's business to understand all styles, and to be prejudiced in favour of none", saw him build in the Neo-Norman style, at Penrhyn and at Gosford Castle in Ireland; the cottage orné style at Craven Cottage; Tudor Revival at Margam Castle; Palladianism at Amesbury Abbey; and Jacobethan at Llanover House. Penrhyn Castle is generally considered to be his best work. Exterior The castle is arranged in three main parts: the donjon, modelled on Hedingham Castle in Essex, which contained accommodation for the Pennant family; the central block which contains the state rooms; and the service wing and stables. The castle runs on a north-south axis. The scale is immense, its seventy roofs cover an area of over an acre, and