Fire at Allan Bank triggers plan to create a new sort of visitor attraction at the villa which the poet once described as a 'temple of abomination'. He warmed to it later.

The National Trust is planning to make the best of what initially seemed to be a bad job, by opening a fourth Wordsworth house in the Lake District.

Whether the poet himself would have approved is another matter. He suffered endless problems with smoking chimneys at Allan Bank on the edge of Grasmere, and also wrote of it as a 'temple of abomination' when it was built in the middle of his view from Dove Cottage.

Time has long since mellowed the 1805 Georgian villa but in March it was badly damaged by fire. Repairs are now pretty much finished and the Trust has decided to open the house to the public from the end of next March. For years it had been let to tenants although you could, and still can, take plenty of lovely walks in its grounds.

Allan Bank is doubly special to the NT as later owners included Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, co-founder of the trust which has just celebrated reaching the astonishing total of four million members. He was a tireless campaigner who frequently wrote to the Manchester Guardian about such other abominations as Manchester Corporation's attempt to compensate for flooding the nearby valley which is now Thirlmere reservoir, by planting distinctly out-of-place shrubs in the wild landscape.

The Trust is holding a couple of open events at the house on Wednesday 23 November (10am-midday) and Saturday 26 November (1-3pm) to launch a process of involving anyone and everyone in how the house is to be shown. Although currently an empty shell, Allan Bank has evidence of past decoration including what appear to have been stencil patterns in the Wordsworth's bedroom (one of eight; it is quite a substantial place).

Research since the fire has also shown that the walls changed from cream to stone to a yellowy sandstone and then back to cream during the 206 years since a Liverpool merchant, John Gregory Crump, used his 'new money' to construct Wordsworth's abomination. Window frames have been variously black, red and off-white and samples of all the colours will be on show at the open events.

Allan Bank's First curator, Sarah Woodcock, says:

Initially it will be like visiting an empty property when you're buying a house, and we hope that people will come up with all the ideas you tend to have on occasions like that. For ourselves, we are thinking about somewhere which feels open and full of opportunity, and perhaps encourages the sort of reflections which the Wordsworths and Canon Rawnsley had when they were here.

The gardens will be an extra attraction, with evidence in letters that Wordsworth took a hand in designing a special 'viewing tunnel' and placing stone seats at vantage points overlooking the stupendous view. One of the main windows frames the little island in Grasmere whose proposed sale prompted Hardwick to come up with the concept of the National Trust. He left the house to the Trust when he died in 1920, but with a lifetime's tenancy for his second and much younger wife who only died in 1959.

Allan Bank's association with fire and smoke also saw a large wing at the rear of the house burn down in the 1950s. But historically and in terms of the mainetenance budget, this was a blessing in disguise as it wasn't there in Wordsworth's day.

The other two Wordsworth homes apart from Allan Bank and Dove Cottage are his birthplace in Cockermouth and Rydal Mount, down the valley from Grasmere.