Brydges filled Cannons with Old Masters and Grand Tour acquisitions,[4] and also appointed Handel as resident house composer from 1717 to 1718.

Such was the fame of Cannons that members of the public flocked to visit the estate in great numbers and Alexander Pope was unjustly accused of having represented the house as "Timon's Villa" in his Epistle of Taste (1731).

Due to the cost of building Cannons and significant losses to the family fortune in the South Sea Bubble there was little liquid capital in Henry's inheritance, so in 1747 he held a twelve-day demolition sale at Cannons which saw both the contents and the very structure of the house itself sold piecemeal leaving little more than a ruin barely thirty years after its inception.

This gave it the name Cannons, canon was an archaic term for certain orders of monks including the Augustinians of St Bartholomew's Priory.

Brydges took personal control of the project and it was the work of a string of architects and landscape gardeners, who changed as they fell into and out of favour.

[8][9][10] The house gives its name to the modern local district, Canon's Park, which is largely built upon its parkland and is a wealthy north London suburb.

The Duke went through several architects beginning with William Talman in 1713 who produced twelve plans but was dismissed in 1714 before starting any building on the main house.

Next was John James who designed the north and west ranges (and also rebuilt the local parish church, St Lawrence, Whitchurch, with a baroque interior).

A contemporary account from a 1722 visitor at the time that the finishing touches were being made to the interiors records: The Salon... is to be supported by Marble Pillars and painted by Paullucci [sic Bellucci]; as is the great Staircase, which is all of Marble... this Staircase leads you into the Royal Apartments fronting the Parterre and grand canal and consists of a Suite of six noble rooms well proportioned, finely plaister'd and gilt by Pargotti [sic Giovanni Bagutti, a Swiss-Italian plasterer associated with the architect Gibbs] and the Ceilings painted by Paullucci; from these Apartments you go into my Lords dressing room and Library, fronting the gardens.

[11]The Duke's constantly changing vision brought five different architects to it and though one of the last great Baroque houses Cannons also contributed to the development of Palladianism in England.

[12] Chandos had a water engineer of international fame in his household – his chaplain, the Rev John Theophilus Desaguliers, FRS.

[18] The size of the musical establishment at Cannons declined in the 1720s in response to the family's losses in the South Sea Bubble, a financial crash which took place in 1720.

It has been suggested that the move to Cannons was related to the fact that in 1717 there was reduced demand for his services in central London because operatic productions were experiencing a downturn.

Amongst the most notable paintings were Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard (wrongly attributed to Guercino in the catalogue) which the National Gallery in London acquired in 1986, and Nicolas Poussin's The Choice of Hercules which was purchased at the sale by Henry Hoare for Stourhead, his house in Wiltshire, where it still hangs.

[12] Of the sculptures Grinling Gibbons' carved panel The Stoning of St Stephen is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum,[17] and a statue claiming to be of George II by John van Nost is in Golden Square.

[22] Another statue modelled by C. Burchard in about 1716 and cast by John Van Nost, of George I, was moved to Leicester Square, where, after frequent vandalism, it was removed in 1872.

[23] The rest of the house and contents were dispersed across the country and the location of much has been lost, however some substantial elements can still be seen, including the Ionic columns from the colonnade which some sources now place in front of the National Gallery in London.

[28] The estate itself was purchased by the cabinet maker William Hallett who in 1760 built a large villa on the site which today houses the North London Collegiate School, where part of the original temple can still be seen, and is known by the modern spelling, Canons.

[30] Such was the fame of the house that the duke had to introduce crowd control measures – including a one-way system – to manage the large numbers of visitors who flocked to the estate.

[31]A few years later Alexander Pope was seen as satirising Cannons in his poem Of Taste (1731), which ridicules the villa of an aristocrat called "Timon" and includes the lines: Light quirks of Musick, broken and uneven, Make the soul dance upon a Jig to Heaven.