Dorneywood is an eighteenth-century brick house set in the grounds of Burnham Beeches. The house was added to around 1850 and rebuilt in the same plain Georgian style after a fire in 1910. Sir Courtauld Greenwood Courtauld-Thomson (1865–1954) acquired the house in 1919. He gave it to the National Trust in 1942, to serve as an official country residence for a Secretary of State or other Minister of the Crown. The most significant painting, on the draught lobby screening the front door, is ‘Ave Silvae Dornii’ (1928), a trompe l’oeil by Rex Whistler.