When the Duke of Newcastle died in 1768, his widow sold the estate to Robert Clive, founder of Britain's Indian Empire. Although the great house was then little more than fifty years old, it was aesthetically and politically out of fashion. Lord Clive decided to demolish the house and commissioned Lancelot "Capability" Brown to build the present Palladian mansion on higher and dryer ground. Brown, more accomplished as a landscape designer than architect, took on his future son-in-law Henry Holland as a junior partner owing to the scale of the project. John Soane, later Sir John Soane, was employed in Holland's office at this time and worked on the project as a draftsman and junior designer. Holland's interiors for Claremont owe much to the contemporary work of Robert Adam.