That deepest-England name, that landscape, that period, strange goings-on - you find yourself humming a Michael Nyman tune from Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract as you approach. The jaunty let's-get-it-on track "Chasing sheep is best left to shepherds", inevitably. You can't help it. That hyperbolic Greenaway/Nyman vehicle of 1982 redefined our idea of the look and sound of the 17th-18th century pastoral. Even if you never saw the film. That damnably evocative tune crops up today in so many documentaries and TV ads that it is now hardwired into the nation's consciousness. Along with the greener-than-green landscape, the exaggerated wigs and ruffs, the elaborately contrived language. How we think of these things today stems from Greenaway and his teasingly oblique sex 'n'murder mystery, set in 1694, the most influential thing he has ever done. And all this has now come full circle. Inside Compton Verney, you hear Nyman music playing. And there you find Peter Greenaway, preoccupied with his latest project - part art exhibition, part-film, part performance event. Reality warps and creaks around you.

I hadn't come to meet Greenaway, surrounded as he was by a phalanx of anxious underlings, moving through the fine rooms of Compton Verney like the Mother Art hen surrounded by art chicklets, blocking up windows here, framing vistas with those coloured posts, filling the place with the suitcases of interesting junk ostensibly collected by his alter-ego, one Tulse Luper. It seemed right that Greenaway/Luper should be in attendance, like a household god, even if the mansion with its delicate Adam alterations is a good few decades younger than the setting of The Draughtsman's Contract. While he got on with directing Compton Verney's opening exhibition, I was meeting another kind of director: Paul Williams of architects Stanton Williams. Williams has been involved for the full ten years. Ever since, in fact, Littlewoods millionaire Peter Moores bought the place.