High society! A trip inside the ostentatious, drug-inspired smoking room of the world’s richest man

While the super-rich of the 21st Century have a taste for superyachts, it wasn’t always this way. The third Marquis of Bute, one of the richest men of the 19th Century, preferred extraordinary Gothic architecture.

The Richest Scot in the Empire reveals that Bute’s passion for drug taking impacted on his tastes in interior design.

A must-have for the Victorian gentleman was a room where he and his male friends could go for a smoke.

In his Welsh home, Cardiff Castle, Bute actually had two smoking rooms within the the remodelled Clock Tower, one for use in winter and this one for summer.

As well their Scottish land, Bute’s family owned large estates in Glamorgan in Wales; his father has been hailed as the creator of industrial Cardiff for his investment in railway and dock facilities.

Bute chanelled some of his vast resources into reconstructing Cardiff Castle, working with the designer William Burgess, whom he first met in 1865.

Bute’s summer smoking room was lighter than his winter one and was of double height.

Bute and Burgess both wrote about drug-taking in diaries.

Bute talked about smoking drugged Turkish tobacco when on holiday in Greece, and Burgess once noted he couldn’t attend a wedding because he had ingested too much opium the night before.

The columns of the room are adorned with features such as these life-sized figures, which seem to be clambering out into the room.

Matthew Williams, curator at Cardiff Castle, says that if you take their drug-taking into account then there is an hallucinogenic quality to the space.

‘I think Burgess and Bute in the creation of this tower particularly almost set each other off, I always think in a way the barrel was loaded by Lord Bute, the gun fired by William Burgess and this is the resulting explosion.’