National Trust: Lytes Cary Manor 360 Virtual Tour

Lytes Cary Manor is a National Trust manor house in Somerset. It was created by the Lyte family over five centuries, and the Jenner family bought it in 1907 and restored it to what visitors see today. Its hallways are tight and its stairs steep, so some visitors cannot see the whole house in person.

The first version of this tour was built for kiosk tablets in the entrance hall, for visitors unable to manage the stairs. We photographed eleven rooms in a single day, using long exposures and many layered images for the darkest of them: the Lobby had no lighting and was almost black to the naked eye, but the tour shows the detail of its wallpaper. The tour has now been rebuilt as one of our bespoke 360 virtual tours, with an interface designed around the house: serif type, gold on a dark ground, the red, blue, gold and green of heraldry, and a shield to mark every object. Below we walk through each feature and why it is there.

Five centuries in four dates

The tour opens over the Great Hall with a short introduction to the house and its history in four dates, each in its own heraldic colour: 1348, when the Chapel was completed; the 1460s, when Thomas Lyte rebuilt the Great Hall; 1578, when Henry Lyte published A Niewe Herball; and 1907, when Sir Walter and Lady Jenner bought the house. Visitors can enter the Great Hall or choose a room.

Eleven rooms, numbered like a guidebook

Each room is numbered in Roman numerals, from I, the Great Hall, to XI, the Chapel. A panel at the bottom names the room, says how many objects there are to discover and has previous and next buttons, with a row of diamonds showing where the room sits in the house. Doorways in the 360 are marked with an arch and the name of the next room.

“Rooms” opens every room as a photograph with its numeral and how many objects it holds.

Thirty-one objects, each with a shield

The collection is the reason most people visit, so every object of interest is marked in the 360 with a numbered shield. Opening one turns the view to it and shows a close-up photograph and a description, from the La Marche tapestry in the Great Hall and the first edition of Henry Lyte’s Niewe Herball in the Oriel Room to the two leather “Good Companions” in the Great Parlour, thought to have been brought to the table when thirteen sat down to dinner. A “Next” button moves on to the next object in the room.

In the Chapel, the shields mark the frieze Thomas Lyte installed in 1631, painted with the arms of the Lytes and the families they married into, and the window to the memory of Sir William Jenner.

Objects in the house

“Objects” lists all 31 objects in the ten rooms that have them, grouped by room with a photograph of each. It counts how many have been seen, and a switch hides the shields in the 360 for visitors who want to look at the rooms on their own.

Designed for a phone

On a small screen the welcome stacks, the room panel sits at the bottom of the view, object cards open with their photograph above the text, and the objects list becomes two columns.

Self hosted, with no platform fee

Like our other bespoke tours, this one is a self-contained website that can run on a kiosk in the house as well as online, with no annual platform subscription for the tour itself. If you look after a historic house, museum or collection, take a look at our heritage and museum virtual tours or get in touch.

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