Kolkata, India

The former home of poet and playwright Girish Chandra Ghosh has been locked up for decades by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, which once a year gives it an exterior paint job, renewing the original red and yellow. Historians want to get into the mansion as no one knows what’s beyond the padlocked door. Some newspapers have speculated that there may be important relics still stored there, but that is only speculation until access is granted.

Loosely based on Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, this domed general post office (1868) evokes Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and the former Government House. The three-storey building consists of large halls with arched corridors that are surrounded by acres of gardens. Imposing lion figures stand atop tall elaborately designed wrought iron gates upon entrance.

A branch of the highly influential Tagore family, which included the poet Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, built this guest house modelled after Windsor Castle. Sadly, the castle never made it to the heritage-buildings list, due to unsympathetic renovations. However, it has become a shrine-like museum commemorating the great modern poet of India.

The Marble Palace in Chorbagan district was built in 1835 by Raja Rajendra Mullick Bahadur, who spared no expense in what has been described as "audaciously vulgar" magnificence. The family still lives in its great halls paved with varicoloured Italian marble and chock-a-block with collections of oversized porcelain vases, chandeliers loaded with Venetian crystals, ormolu on nearly every surface, giant mirrors now foxed from the climate, a collection of statues of Queen Victoria and hundreds of paintings, some purporting to be the work of Titian and Rubens. In the surrounding gardens, a visitor could trip over statues of sweetly napping lions, roaring lions and other mythological figures. The Marble Palace, inside and out, is strictly off limits to photographers.