Bearwood or Bear Wood, Sindlesham, Berkshire, England is a Victorian country house built for John Walter, the owner of The Times.

Originally a coal merchant and underwriter, in 1785 John Walter had established The Daily Universal Register, renamed as The Times in 1788.

Making, and subsequently losing, a fortune as a coal merchant and underwriter, in 1785, Walter established The Daily Universal Register, "to record the principal occurrences of the times".

By a combination of exceptionally fast reporting; The Times' report of Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar was published several days before the British government received the official communique from the Admiralty; and technological innovation, The Times had the first steam-powered printing press; Walter's son, John Walter II, made the newspaper profitable.

[2] Some of the revenues were deployed to buy the estate of Bear Wood from the Crown, and in 1822 Walter II built a small villa, in a neoclassical style, on the site.

[3] In 1864 his son, John Walter III, employed Robert Kerr to replace his father's villa with an enormous mansion in the Jacobethan style.

His practice was never large, and his prominence owed more to his writings, specifically, The Gentleman's House: Or, How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace, published in 1864.

[5] Pevsner suggests that this gained Kerr the Bearwood commission in 1865,[4] a job that Walter had originally intended to give to the much more notable William Burn.

[6] The first part of Kerr's tome comprised an immensely-detailed guide to every aspect of the design of the mid-Victorian country house; sections included, "Privacy - defined and exemplified", "Salubrity - general rules", the "Boudoir - defined", the "Smoking room - position, access, prospect and ventilation, "Water closets - notes thereon", the "Soiled linen closet - position and arrangement" and "Flower gardens - several kinds".

Mark Girouard, in his pioneering study, The Victorian Country House, calls it a "synopsis [with] interminable offices, corridors, stairs and entrances".

In the early 1980s, the school separated from its founding charity, which retained ownership of the house and estate, leading to a lengthy legal dispute between the governors of the college and the trustees of the Merchant Seamans Foundation that was finally concluded by mediation in 2011.

[28] Girouard considers the main staircase the house's coup de théâtre; "one raises one's eyes and finds oneself looking up to the roof of the tower, 88 feet above, painted dark blue and sprinkled with gold stars".