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Where the gift shop and other later additions now sit was once an impluvium, a Roman-era cistern that sat in a soaring 50-foot-high space that was open to the sky.

The house possesses features that match the horizontally fluted walls, pillars, central impluvium and carved decorations observed in the architecture of ancient Benin.

These main streets, which ran at right angles to each other, had underground drainage made of a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away storm water.

It is approached by a flight of brick steps, and after entering the door-way, which is flanked by two small lateral columns, one finds himself in a court resembling the patio which occupies the centre of Spanish and Moorish dwellings, and which the ancients termed impluvium or cavædium.

The metal dial face is supported by a marble slab resting on two carved standards of classic design representing conventionalized lions, these being copies of those two splendid standards unearthed at Pompeii, which still may be seen by the side of the impluvium in the atrium or main hall of the finest Gr�co-Roman dwelling-place which has been restored in that wonderful city.