This requires another considerable readjustment of your received ideas about the way the world works. Sir Peter Moores, a noted philanthropist now in his early seventies, was well into art (and directed opera) before he went into the family department store business. Since he retired from that, he has gone right back to his first love. To the extent that he bought the dilapidated, long-empty Compton Verney and its grounds back in 1993, with the intention of turning it into a public art gallery not only for the likes of Tulse Luper to prowl around, but also for his own burgeoning collection. He has so far spent £64 million on this project, including buying art in his favoured fields of Neapolitan canvases of the 17th and 18th centuries, German medieval painting and sculpture, Chinese bronzes and pottery, and British folk and popular art. And commissioning new work such as Greenaway's. About £17m has gone on restoring and converting the house and building its gallery extension. It is all private money. Nothing from the Lottery, yet the name of Moores appears nowhere on or in the building, nor does he live there. I have no idea what Moores looks like. He is a palpable absence. The more you think about it, the more of a Greenaway concept it all seems.

Paul Williams is a necessary corrective to such metaphysical speculations. Williams is a grounded architect, no nonsense. With his partner Alan Stanton he helped to keep clean-limbed modernism alive during its dark days of the 1980s, and was rewarded with increasingly important commissions in exhibition and museum design, even the total refurbishment of the National Theatre. Stanton Williams are the kind of modernists who are good at working with historic buildings, even if this sometimes causes controversy, as it did when they got to grips with Oxford's Ashmolean museum a few years back. Their visitor centre for Whitby Abbey, opened last year, is a delight. They are just finishing another such centre, for the Tower of London. So Compton Verney draws on long experience. For all that, Williams is not one of that bloodless breed, a Polite Modernist. His work is tough, at times challenging. The new gallery grafted onto the back of the old house, between it and a church designed by Capability Brown, is verging on the Brutalist.