The Tower House, 29 Melbury Road, is a late-Victorian
townhouse
A townhouse, townhome, town house, or town home, is a type of terraced housing. A modern townhouse is often one with a small footprint on multiple floors. In a different British usage, the term originally referred to any type of city residence ...
in the
Holland Park district of
Kensington and Chelsea, London, built by the architect and designer
William Burges
William Burges (; 2 December 1827 – 20 April 1881) was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoc ...
as his home. Designed between 1875 and 1881, in the French
Gothic Revival style, it was described by the architectural historian
J. Mordaunt Crook as "the most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival, and the last". The house is built of red brick, with
Bath stone dressings and green roof slates from
Cumbria
Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. C ...
, and has a distinctive cylindrical tower and conical roof. The ground floor contains a drawing room, a dining room and a library, while the first floor has two bedrooms and an armoury. Its exterior and the interior echo elements of Burges's earlier work, particularly
Park House in Cardiff and
Castell Coch
(; ) is a 19th-century Gothic Revival castle built above the village of in South Wales. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans after 1081 to protect the newly conquered town of Cardiff and control the route along the Taff G ...
. It was designated a
Grade I
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
in 1949.
Burges bought the lease on the plot of land in 1875. The house was built by the Ashby Brothers, with interior decoration by members of Burges's long-standing team of craftsmen such as
Thomas Nicholls and
Henry Stacy Marks
Henry Stacy Marks (13 September 1829 – 9 January 1898) was a British artist who took a particular interest in Shakespearean and medieval themes in his early career and later in decorative art depicting birds and ornithologists as well as lan ...
. By 1878 the house was largely complete, although interior decoration and the designing of numerous items of furniture and metalwork continued until Burges's death in 1881. The house was inherited by his brother-in-law,
Richard Popplewell Pullan. It was later sold to Colonel T. H. Minshall and then, in 1933, to Colonel E. R. B. Graham. The poet
John Betjeman inherited the remaining lease in 1962 but did not extend it. Following a period when the house stood empty and suffered vandalism, it was purchased and restored, first by Lady Jane Turnbull, later by the actor
Richard Harris
Richard St John Francis Harris (1 October 1930 – 25 October 2002) was an Irish actor and singer. He appeared on stage and in many films, notably as Corrado Zeller in Michelangelo Antonioni's '' Red Desert'', Frank Machin in '' This Sporting ...
and then by the musician
Jimmy Page.
The house retains most of its internal structural decoration, but much of the furniture, fittings and contents that Burges designed has been dispersed. Many items, including the
Great Bookcase
The Great Bookcase is a large piece of painted furniture designed by the English architect and designer William Burges.Dakers 1999, p. 175. The bookcase is high and wide. It has been described as "the most important example of Victorian painte ...
, the
Zodiac settle, the
Golden Bed and the
Red Bed, are now in museums such as the
Ashmolean
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University o ...
in
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
,
the Higgins in
Bedford
Bedford is a market town in Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 Census, the population of the Bedford built-up area (including Biddenham and Kempston) was 106,940, making it the second-largest settlement in Bedfordshire, behind Luton, whilst ...
and the
Victoria and Albert in London, while others are in private collections.
Location and setting
The Tower House is on a corner of Melbury Road, just north of
Kensington High Street, in the district of
Holland Park. It stands opposite Stavordvale Lodge and next to
Woodland House, built for the artist
Luke Fildes
__NOTOC__
Sir Samuel Luke Fildes (3 October 1843 – 28 February 1927) was a British painter and illustrator born in Liverpool and trained at the South Kensington and Royal Academy Schools. He was the grandson of the political activist Mar ...
. The development of Melbury Road in the grounds of
Little Holland House
Little Holland House was the dower house of Holland House in the parish of Kensington, Middlesex, England. It was situated at the end of Nightingale Lane, now the back entrance to Holland Park and was demolished when Melbury Road was made. Nu ...
created an
art colony
An art colony, also known as an artists' colony, can be defined two ways. Its most liberal description refers to the organic congregation of artists in towns, villages and rural areas, often drawn by areas of natural beauty, the prior existence o ...
in Holland Park, the
Holland Park Circle
The Holland Park Circle was an informal group of 19th-century artists based in the Holland Park district of West London. George Frederick Watts, Frederic Leighton, Valentine Prinsep, Luke Fildes, Hamo Thornycroft and William Burges are consider ...
. Its most prominent member,
Frederic, Lord Leighton, lived at
Leighton House
The Leighton House Museum is an art museum in the Holland Park area of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in west London.
The building was the London home of painter Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton (1830–1896), who commi ...
, 12 Holland Park Road, and at the time of Leighton's death in 1896 six
Royal Academicians, as well as one associate member, were living in Holland Park Road and Melbury Road.
History
Design, construction and craftsmanship, 1875–78
![The Tower House 1878](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/The_Tower_House_1878.jpg)
In 1863,
William Burges
William Burges (; 2 December 1827 – 20 April 1881) was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoc ...
gained his first major architectural commission,
Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral
Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral ( ga, Ardeaglais Naomh Fionnbarra) is a Gothic Revival three-spire Church of Ireland cathedral in the city of Cork. It is located on the south bank of the River Lee and dedicated to Finbarr of Cork, patron saint of ...
,
Cork, at the age of 35. In the following twelve years, his architecture, metalwork, jewellery, furniture and stained glass led his biographer,
J. Mordaunt Crook to suggest that Burges rivaled
Pugin as "the greatest art-architect of the Gothic Revival". But by 1875, his short career was largely over. Although he worked to finalise earlier projects, he received no further major commissions, and the design, construction, decoration and furnishing of the Tower House occupied much of the last six years of his life. In December 1875, after rejecting plots in Victoria Road, Kensington and
Bayswater, Burges purchased the leasehold of the plot in Melbury Road from the
Earl of Ilchester
Earl of Ilchester is a title in the Peerage of Great Britain. It was created in 1756 for Stephen Fox, 1st Baron Ilchester, who had previously represented Shaftesbury in Parliament. He had already been created Baron Ilchester, of Ilchester in ...
, the owner of the Holland Estate. The
ground rent was £100 per annum. Initial drawings for the house had been undertaken in July 1875 and the final form was decided upon by the end of the year.
Building began in 1876, contracted to the Ashby Brothers of Kingsland Road at a cost of £6,000.
At the Tower House Burges drew on his own "experience of twenty years learning, travelling and building", and used many of the artists and craftsmen who had worked with him on earlier buildings.
An estimate book compiled by him, and now in the
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
, contains the names of the individuals and companies that worked at the house.
Thomas Nicholls was responsible for the stone carving, including the
capitals,
corbels and the
chimneypieces. The
mosaic
A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...
and marble work was contracted to Burke and Company of
Regent Street, while the decorative tiles were supplied by W. B. Simpson and Sons Ltd of
the Strand.
John Ayres Hatfield crafted the bronze decorations on the doors, while the woodwork was the responsibility of John Walden of
Covent Garden.
Henry Stacy Marks
Henry Stacy Marks (13 September 1829 – 9 January 1898) was a British artist who took a particular interest in Shakespearean and medieval themes in his early career and later in decorative art depicting birds and ornithologists as well as lan ...
and
Frederick Weekes
Frederick Weekes (1834-1924) was an English painter and designer. Son of the successful Victorian sculptor, Henry Weekes, two of his brothers also became artists, the genre and animal painters Herbert William Weekes and Henry Weekes Junior.
H ...
were employed to decorate the walls with murals, and Campbell and Smith of
Southampton Row
The A4200 is a major thoroughfare in central London. It runs between the A4 at Aldwych, to the A400 Hampstead Road/Camden High Street, at Mornington Crescent tube station.
Kingsway
Kingsway is a major road in central London, designa ...
had responsibility for most of the painted decoration. Marks painted birds above the
frieze
In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...
in the library, and the illustrations of famous lovers in the drawing-room were by Weekes. They also painted the figures on the bookcases in the library. The stained glass was by
Saunders and Company
Saunders is a surname of English and Scottish patronymic origin derived from Sander, a mediaeval form of Alexander.See also: Sander (name)
People
* Ab Saunders (1851–1883), American cowboy and gunman
* Al Saunders (born 1947), American foot ...
of Long Acre, with initial designs by
Horatio Walter Lonsdale.
Burges to Graham, 1878–1962
![Burges as Burges](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Burges_as_Burges.jpg)
Burges spent his first night at the house on 5 March 1878. It provided a suitable backdrop for entertaining his range of friends, "the whole gamut of
Pre-Raphaelite
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James ...
London." His dogs, Dandie, Bogie and Pinkie, are immortalised in paintings on various pieces of furniture such as the Dog Cabinet and the foot of
The Red Bed. Burges displayed his extensive collection of armour in the armoury. The decoration of his bedroom hints at another of his passions: a fondness for
opium. Stylised poppies cover the panels of a cupboard which was set next to his bed.
In 1881, after catching a chill while overseeing work at Cardiff, Burges returned, half paralysed, to the house where he lay dying for some three weeks. Among his last visitors were
Oscar Wilde and
James Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (; July 10, 1834July 17, 1903) was an American painter active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He eschewed sentimentality and moral allusion in painting and was a leading pr ...
. Burges died in the
Red Bed on 20 April 1881, just over three years after moving into the Tower House; he was 53 years old. He was buried in
West Norwood Cemetery
West Norwood Cemetery is a rural cemetery in West Norwood in London, England. It was also known as the South Metropolitan Cemetery.
One of the first private landscaped cemeteries in London, it is one of the " Magnificent Seven" cemeteries of ...
.
The lease on the house was inherited by Burges's brother-in-law,
Richard Popplewell Pullan. Pullan completed some of Burges's unfinished projects and wrote two studies of his work. The lease was then purchased by Colonel T. H. Minshall, author of ''What to Do with Germany'' and ''Future Germany'', and father of
Merlin Minshall. Minshall sold his lease to Colonel E. R. B. and Mrs. Graham in 1933. The Tower House was designated a
Grade I
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
listed building on 29 July 1949.
Betjeman to Turnbull, 1962–69
John Betjeman was a friend of the Grahams and was given the remaining two-year lease on the house, together with some of the furniture, on Mrs. Graham's death in 1962. Betjeman, a champion of Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, was an early admirer of Burges. In 1957 the Tower House had featured in the fifth episode of his BBC television series, ''An Englishman's Castle''. In a radio interview of 1952 about
Cardiff Castle Betjeman spoke of the architect and his foremost work: "a great brain has made this place. I don't see how anyone can fail to be impressed by its weird beauty ... awed into silence from the force of this Victorian dream of the Middle Ages."
Because of a potential liability for £10,000 of renovation work upon the expiry of the lease, Betjeman considered the house too costly to maintain, and subsequently vacated it. From 1962 to 1966, the house stood empty and suffered vandalism and neglect. A survey undertaken in January 1965 revealed that the exterior stonework was badly decayed, dry rot had eaten through the roof and the structural floor timbers, and the attics were infested with pigeons. Vandals had stripped the lead from the water tanks and had damaged the mirrors, fireplaces and carving work. The most notable loss was the theft of the carved figure of ''Fame'' from the Dining Room chimneypiece. Betjeman suggested that the owner's agents had deliberately refused to let the house, and allowed it to decline, intending to demolish it and redevelop the site. Writing in
''Country Life'' in 1966, Charles Handley-Read took a different view saying that "the
Ilchester Estate, upon which the house is situated, are anxious that it should be preserved and
ave
''Alta Velocidad Española'' (''AVE'') is a service of high-speed rail in Spain operated by Renfe, the Spanish national railway company, at speeds of up to . As of December 2021, the Spanish high-speed rail network, on part of which the AVE s ...
entered into a long lease conditional upon the house being put into a state of good repair." In March 1965, the
Historic Buildings Council
Three separate historic buildings councils were created by the Historic Buildings and Ancient Monuments Act 1953, one for each of England, Scotland, and Wales. Each Historic Buildings Council advised the relevant government minister on the exercise ...
obtained a preservation order on the house, enabling the purchaser of the lease, Lady Jane Turnbull, daughter of
William Grey, 9th Earl of Stamford
William Grey, 9th Earl of Stamford (18 April 1850 – 24 May 1910) was an English peer.
Grey was born in Newfoundland, the son of Revd. William Grey and Harriet White, educated at Exeter College, Oxford and, from 1878 to 1883, Professor of Classi ...
, to initiate a programme of restoration the following July. These renovations were supported by grants of £4,000 from the Historic Buildings Council and £3,000 from the
Greater London Council. The lease was sold in 1969.
Harris and Page, 1969 onwards
![Jimmy Page at the Echo music award 2013](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Jimmy_Page_at_the_Echo_music_award_2013.jpg)
The actor
Richard Harris
Richard St John Francis Harris (1 October 1930 – 25 October 2002) was an Irish actor and singer. He appeared on stage and in many films, notably as Corrado Zeller in Michelangelo Antonioni's '' Red Desert'', Frank Machin in '' This Sporting ...
bought the lease for £75,000 in 1969 after discovering that the American entertainer
Liberace
Władziu Valentino Liberace (May 16, 1919 – February 4, 1987) was an American pianist, singer, and actor. A child prodigy born in Wisconsin to parents of Italian and Polish origin, he enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordi ...
had made an offer but had not put down a deposit. Reading of the intended sale in the ''
Evening Standard
The ''Evening Standard'', formerly ''The Standard'' (1827–1904), also known as the ''London Evening Standard'', is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format.
In October 2009, after be ...
'', Harris bought it the following day, describing his purchase as the biggest gift he had ever given himself. In his autobiography, the entertainer
Danny La Rue recalled visiting the house with Liberace, writing, "It was a strange building and had eerie murals painted on the ceiling
..I sensed evil". Meeting La Rue later, Harris said he had found the house haunted by the ghosts of children from an orphanage that he believed had previously occupied the site and that he had placated them by buying them toys. Harris employed the original decorators, Campbell Smith & Company Ltd., to carry out restoration, using Burges's drawings from the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Jimmy Page, the
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The group comprised vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham. With a heavy, guitar-driven sound, they are ci ...
guitarist, bought the house from Harris in 1972 for £350,000, outbidding the musician
David Bowie
David Robert Jones (8 January 194710 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie ( ), was an English singer-songwriter and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the ...
. Page, an enthusiast of Burges and for the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, commented in an interview in 2012: "I was still finding things 20 years after being there – a little beetle on the wall or something like that; it's Burges's attention to detail that is so fascinating."
In 2015 Page successfully challenged a planning application lodged by the pop star
Robbie Williams
Robert Peter Williams (born 13 February 1974) is an English singer and songwriter. He found fame as a member of the pop group Take That from 1990 to 1995, and achieved commercial success after launching a solo career in 1996. His debut stud ...
, who had purchased the adjacent
Woodland House in 2013 and planned extensive renovations. Page argued that the alterations, particularly the intended underground excavations, would threaten the structure of the Tower House. Ongoing disagreements between Williams and Page over Williams' development plans continue to feature in Britain's press.
Architecture
Exterior and design
The cultural historian Caroline Dakers wrote that the Tower House was a "pledge to the spirit of Gothic in an area given over to Queen Anne". Burges loathed the
Queen Anne style prevalent in Holland Park, writing that it: "like other fashions
..will have its day, I do not call it Queen Anne art, for, unfortunately I see no art in it at all". His inspirations were
French Gothic domestic architecture of the thirteenth century
and more recent models drawn from the work of the 19th-century French architect
Viollet-le-Duc.
Architectural historians
Gavin Stamp
Gavin Mark Stamp (15 March 194830 December 2017) was a British writer, television presenter and architectural historian.
Education
Stamp was educated at Dulwich College in South London from 1959 to 1967 as part of the "Dulwich Experiment", then a ...
and Colin Amery considered that the building "sums up Burges in miniature. Although clearly a redbrick suburban house, it is massive, picturesquely composed, with a prominent tourelle for the staircase which is surmounted by a conical roofed turret." Burges's neighbour Luke Fildes described the house as a "model modern house of moderately large size in the 13th-century style built to show what may be done for 19th-century everyday wants".
The house has an L-shaped plan, and the exterior is plain, of red brick, with
Bath stone dressings and green roof slates from Cumberland. With a floor plan of , Burges went about its construction on a grand scale. The architect
R. Norman Shaw remarked that the concrete foundations were suitable "for a fortress". This approach, combined with Burges's architectural skills and the minimum of exterior decoration, created a building that Crook described as "simple and massive". Following his usual pattern, Burges re-worked many elements of earlier designs, adapting them as appropriate. The frontages come from the other townhouse he designed,
Park House, Cardiff
Park House ( cy, Tŷ Parc; formerly McConnochie House), 20 Park Place, Cardiff, Wales, is a nineteenth century town house. It was built for John McConnochie, Chief Engineer to the Bute Docks, by the Gothic revivalist architect William Burges. It ...
, then known as the McConnochie House after its owner, although they have been reversed, with the
arcaded, street front from Park House forming the garden front of the Tower House. The staircase is consigned to the conical tower, avoiding the error Burges made at the earlier house, where he placed the staircase in the middle of the hall. The cylindrical tower and conical roof derive from
Castell Coch
(; ) is a 19th-century Gothic Revival castle built above the village of in South Wales. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans after 1081 to protect the newly conquered town of Cardiff and control the route along the Taff G ...
, and the interiors are inspired from examples at Cardiff Castle. The house has two main floors, with a basement below and a
garret
A garret is a habitable attic, a living space at the top of a house or larger residential building, traditionally, small, dismal, and cramped, with sloping ceilings. In the days before elevators this was the least prestigious position in a bui ...
above.
The ground floor contains a drawing room, a dining room and a library, while the first floor has two bedrooms and an armoury.
Plan
Interior
The architectural writer
Bridget Cherry
Bridget Cherry OBE, FSA, Hon. FRIBA (born 17 May 1941) is a British architectural historian who was series editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides from 1971 until 2002, and is the author or co-author of several volumes in the series. wrote that "the sturdy exterior gives little hint of the fantasy
urgescreated inside", interiors which the art historian and Burges scholar
Charles Handley-Read described as "at once opulent, aggressive, obsessional, enchanting, their grandeur border
ngon grandiloquence". Each room has a complex iconographic scheme of decoration: in the hall it is Time; in the drawing room, Love; in Burges's bedroom, the Sea. Massive fireplaces with elaborate
overmantels were carved and installed, described by Crook as "veritable altars of art
..some of the most amazing pieces of decoration Burges ever designed". Handley-Read considered that Burges's decorations were "unique, almost magical
ndquite unlike anything designed by his contemporaries".
Ground floor
![BLW Decanter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/BLW_Decanter.jpg)
A bronze-covered door, with relief panels depicting figures, opens onto the entrance hall.
In Burges's time the door had a letterbox, in the form of
Mercury, the messenger of the gods. The letterbox is now lost, but a contemporary copy is in the collection of The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum.
The porch contains a white marble seat and column, and on the floor is a mosaic of Pinkie, a favourite poodle of Burges. Cartooned by H. W. Lonsdale, it resembles the ''cave canem'' floor at
Pompei.
The interior centres on the double-height entrance hall, with the theme of Time. The painted ceiling depicts the
astrological sign
In Western astrology, astrological signs are the twelve 30-degree sectors that make up Earth's 360-degree orbit around the Sun. The signs enumerate from the first day of spring, known as the First Point of Aries, which is the vernal equinox. ...
s of the
constellations, arranged in the positions they held when the house was first occupied.
A large stained glass window contains four female figures representing Dawn, Noon, Twilight and Night. A mosaic floor in the entrance hall contains a
labyrinth
In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth (, ) was an elaborate, confusing structure designed and built by the legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos. Its function was to hold the Minotaur, the monster eventually killed by t ...
design, with the centre depicting the myth of
Theseus slaying the Minotaur. The garden's entrance door, also covered in bronze, is decorated with a relief of the
Madonna and Child
In art, a Madonna () is a representation of Mary, either alone or with her child Jesus. These images are central icons for both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. The word is (archaic). The Madonna and Child type is very prevalent i ...
.
As elsewhere, Burges incorporated earlier designs, the bronze doors echoing those at Cork Cathedral, and the maze floor recalling an earlier ceiling at Burges's office at 15 Buckingham Street. Emblems adorn the five doors on the ground floor, each one relevant to their respective room. A flower marked the door to the garden, with the front door marked by a key. The library is indicated by an open book, the drawing or music room by musical instruments, and the dining room by a bowl and flask of wine.
The library, its walls lined with bookcases, features a sculptured mantelpiece resembling the
Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel ( he, , ''Mīgdal Bāḇel'') narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages.
According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and mi ...
. The hooded chimneypiece represents the "dispersion of languages", with figures depicting Nimrod ruling over the elements of speech. Two trumpeters represent the pronouns, a queen embodies the verb, a porter the noun, and numerous other gilded and painted figures are displayed. The ceiling is divided into eight compartments, with depictions of the six founders of law and philosophy:
Moses,
St. Paul
Paul; grc, Παῦλος, translit=Paulos; cop, ⲡⲁⲩⲗⲟⲥ; hbo, פאולוס השליח (previously called Saul of Tarsus;; ar, بولس الطرسوسي; grc, Σαῦλος Ταρσεύς, Saũlos Tarseús; tr, Tarsuslu Pavlus; ...
,
Luther
Luther may refer to:
People
* Martin Luther (1483–1546), German monk credited with initiating the Protestant Reformation
* Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), American minister and leader in the American civil rights movement
* Luther (give ...
,
Mahomet,
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
and
Justinian
Justinian I (; la, Iustinianus, ; grc-gre, Ἰουστινιανός ; 48214 November 565), also known as Justinian the Great, was the Byzantine emperor from 527 to 565.
His reign is marked by the ambitious but only partly realized ''renovat ...
. An illuminated alphabet frieze of architecture and the visual arts running around the bookcases completes the scheme, with the letters of the alphabet incorporated, including a letter "H" falling below the cornice. Due to
''H''-dropping being a social taboo in Victorian times, Handley-Read described it as the "most celebrated of all Burges's jokes". Artists and craftsmen are featured at work on each lettered door of the bookcases that surround the room.
In a panel in one of the glazed doors which open onto the garden, Burges is shown standing in front of a model of the Tower House. He features as Architect, the 'A' forming the first letter of the alphabet frieze. Both the Architecture Cabinet and the Great Bookcase stood in this room. The stained glass windows in the room represent painting, architecture and sculpture, and were painted by Weekes.
![Tower House dining room](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Tower_House_dining_room.jpg)
On the wall opposite the library fireplace is an opening into the drawing room. Inside there are three stained glass windows which are set in ornamented marble linings.
Opposite the windows stood the Zodiac Settle, which Burges moved from Buckingham Street. Love is the central decorative scheme to the room,
with the ceiling painted with medieval
cupids, and the walls covered with mythical lovers. Carved figures from the ''
Roman de la Rose
''Le Roman de la Rose'' (''The Romance of the Rose'') is a medieval poem written in Old French and presented as an allegorical dream vision. As poetry, ''The Romance of the Rose'' is a notable instance of courtly literature, purporting to prov ...
'' decorate the chimneypiece,
which Crook considered "one of the most glorious that Burges and Nicholls ever produced". Echoing Crook, Charles Handley-Read wrote, "Working together, Burges and Nicholls had transposed a poem into sculpture with a delicacy that is very nearly musical. The ''Roman de la Rose'' has come to life."
The dining room is devoted to
Geoffrey Chaucer's ''
The House of Fame
''The House of Fame'' (''Hous of Fame'' in the original spelling) is a Middle English poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, probably written between 1374 and 1385, making it one of his earlier works. It was most likely written after ''The Book of the Duchess' ...
'' and the art of story-telling, Crook explaining that "tall stories are part of the dining room rite". The hooded chimneypiece, of Devonshire marble, contained a bronze figure above the fireplace representing the Goddess of Fame; its hands and face were made of ivory, with sapphires for eyes. It was later stolen. The tiles on the walls depict fairy stories, including ''
Reynard the Fox
Reynard the Fox is a literary cycle of medieval allegorical Dutch, English, French and German fables. The first extant versions of the cycle date from the second half of the 12th century. The genre was popular throughout the Late Middle Ages, a ...
'', ''
Jack and the Beanstalk
"Jack and the Beanstalk" is an English fairy tale. It appeared as "The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" in 1734 4th edition On Commons and as Benjamin Tabart's moralized "The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk" in 1807. Henry Co ...
'' and ''
Little Red Riding Hood
"Little Red Riding Hood" is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a sly wolf. Its origins can be traced back to several pre-17th century European folk tales. The two best known versions were written by Charles Perrault and the Brot ...
''. The room also shows Burges's innovative use of materials: Handley-Read observed that the Victorians had "a horror of food smells" and therefore the room was constructed using materials that did not absorb odours and could be washed. The walls are covered with Devonshire marble, surmounted by glazed picture tiles, while the ceiling is of sheet metal. The ceiling is divided into coffered compartments by square beams, and features symbols of the Sun, the planets and the signs of the Zodiac. Burges designed most of the cutlery and plate used in this room, which display his skills as a designer of metalwork, including the claret jug and Cat Cup chosen by Lord and Lady Bute as mementos from Burges's collection after his death. The panels of the wine cupboard were decorated by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhoo ...
.
First floor and garret
![Guest bedroom, Tower House](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Guest_bedroom%2C_Tower_House.jpg)
The windows of the stair turret represent
"the Storming of the Castle of Love".
On the first floor are two bedrooms and an armoury. Burges's bedroom, with a theme of sea creatures, overlooks the garden.
Its elaborate ceiling is segmented into panels by gilded and painted beams, studded with miniature convex mirrors set in to gilt stars. Fish and eels swim in a frieze of waves painted under the ceiling, and fish are also carved in relief on the chimneypiece. On the fire-hood, a sculpted mermaid gazes into a looking-glass, with seashells, coral, seaweed and a baby mermaid also represented.
Charles Handley-Read described the frieze around the Mermaid fireplace as "proto-
Art Nouveau" and noted "the debt of international art nouveau to Victorian Gothic designers, Burges included". In this room, Burges placed two of his most personal pieces of furniture, the Red Bed, in which he died, and the
Narcissus washstand, both of which originally came from Buckingham Street. The bed is painted blood red and features a panel depicting ''
Sleeping Beauty
''Sleeping Beauty'' (french: La belle au bois dormant, or ''The Beauty in the Sleeping Forest''; german: Dornröschen, or ''Little Briar Rose''), also titled in English as ''The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods'', is a fairy tale about a princess cu ...
''. The washstand is red and gold; its tip-up basin of marble inlaid with fishes is silver and gold.
"The Earth and its productions" is the theme of the guest room facing the street.
Its ceiling is adorned with butterflies and
fleurs-de-lis
The fleur-de-lis, also spelled fleur-de-lys (plural ''fleurs-de-lis'' or ''fleurs-de-lys''), is a lily (in French, and mean 'flower' and 'lily' respectively) that is used as a decorative design or symbol.
The fleur-de-lis has been used in the ...
, and at the crossing of the main beams is a convex mirror in a gilded surround. Along the length of the beams are paintings of frogs and mice. A frieze of flowers, once painted over, has since been restored.
The Golden Bed and the Vita Nuova Washstand designed for this room are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Burges designated the final room on the first floor an armoury and used it to display his large collection of armour. The collection was bequeathed to the
British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
upon his death.
A carved chimneypiece in the armoury has three
roundel
A roundel is a circular disc used as a symbol. The term is used in heraldry, but also commonly used to refer to a type of national insignia used on military aircraft, generally circular in shape and usually comprising concentric rings of diff ...
s carved with the goddesses
Minerva
Minerva (; ett, Menrva) is the Roman goddess of wisdom, justice, law, victory, and the sponsor of arts, trade, and strategy. Minerva is not a patron of violence such as Mars, but of strategic war. From the second century BC onward, the Rom ...
,
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never f ...
and
Juno in medieval attire.
The garret originally contained day and night nurseries, which the author
James Stourton considers a surprising choice of arrangement for the "childless bachelor Burges". They contain a pair of decorated chimneypieces featuring the tale of ''Jack and the Beanstalk'' and three monkeys at play.
Garden
The garden at the rear of the house featured raised flowerbeds which Dakers described as being "planned according to those pleasances depicted in medieval romances; beds of scarlet tulips, bordered with stone fencing". On a mosaic terrace, around a statue of a boy holding a hawk, sculpted by Thomas Nicholls, Burges and his guests would sit on "marble seats or on Persian rugs and embroidered cushions." The garden, and that of the adjacent Woodland House, contain trees from the former Little Holland House.
Furniture
![SleepingBeautyBed](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/SleepingBeautyBed.JPG)
In creating the interior of the house, Burges demonstrated his skill as a jeweller, metalworker and designer. He included some of his best pieces of furniture such as the Zodiac Settle, the Dog Cabinet and the Great Bookcase, the last of which Charles Handley-Read described as "occupying a unique position in the history of Victorian painted furniture". The fittings were as elaborate as the furniture: the tap for one of the guest washstands was in the form of a bronze bull from whose throat water poured into a sink inlaid with silver fish. Within the Tower House Burges placed some of his finest metalwork; the artist Henry Stacy Marks wrote, "he could design a chalice as well as a cathedral ... His decanters, cups, jugs, forks and spoons were designed with an equal ability to that with which he would design a castle."
Burges's furniture did not receive universal acclaim. In his major study of English domestic architecture, ''
Das englische Haus'', published some twenty years after Burges's death,
Hermann Muthesius
Adam Gottlieb Hermann Muthesius (20 April 1861 – 29 October 1927), known as Hermann Muthesius, was a German architect, author and diplomat, perhaps best known for promoting many of the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement within German ...
wrote of The Tower House, "Worst of all, perhaps, is the furniture. Some of it is in the earlier manner, some of it box-like and painted all over. This style had now become fashionable, though with what historical justification it is not easy to say".
Many of the early pieces of furniture, such as the Narcissus Washstand, the Zodiac Settle and the Great Bookcase, were originally made for Burges's office at Buckingham Street and were later moved to the Tower House.
The Great Bookcase was also part of Burges's contribution to the Medieval Court at the
1862 International Exhibition
The International Exhibition of 1862, or Great London Exposition, was a world's fair. It was held from 1 May to 1 November 1862, beside the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, South Kensington, London, England, on a site that now houses ...
. Later pieces, such as the Crocker Dressing Table and the Golden Bed, and its accompanying Vita Nuova Washstand, were made specifically for the house. John Betjeman located the Narcissus Washstand in a junk shop in Lincoln and gave it to
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires '' Decl ...
, a fellow enthusiast for Victorian art and architecture, who featured it in his 1957 novel, ''
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.'' Betjeman later gave Waugh both the Zodiac Settle and the Philosophy Cabinet.
Many of the decorative items Burges designed for the Tower House were dispersed in the decades following his death.
Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television ...
purchased the Great Bookcase for the
Ashmolean Museum. Several pieces purchased by Charles Handley-Read, who was instrumental in reviving interest in Burges, were acquired by The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford. The museum also bought the Zodiac Settle from the Waugh family in 2011.
Dispersed furniture and locations
The table below lists the known pieces of furniture originally ''
in situ
''In situ'' (; often not italicized in English) is a Latin phrase that translates literally to "on site" or "in position." It can mean "locally", "on site", "on the premises", or "in place" to describe where an event takes place and is used in ...
'', with their dates of construction and their current location where known.
Architectural coverage
Edward Godwin, fellow architect and close friend of Burges, wrote of Burges's unified approach to building and design in an article in ''The British Architect'', published in 1878: "the interior and the exterior, the building and its furniture, the enclosed as well as the enclosure, are in full accord." Richard Popplewell Pullan described the house in detail in the second of two works he wrote about his brother-in-law, ''The House of William Burges, A.R.A.'', published in 1886. The book contains photographs of the interior of the house by
Francis Bedford.
In 1893, the building was the only private house to be recorded in an article in ''The Builder'', which gave an overview of the architecture of the previous fifty years. It was referenced again a decade later by Muthesius, who described it as "the most highly developed Gothic house to have been built in the 19th century (and) the last to be built in England". It was then largely ignored, with James Stourton describing its early twentieth-century decline as "a paradigm of the reputation of the
Gothic Revival".
A renewed understanding and appreciation of the building, and of Burges himself, began with Charles Handley-Read's essay on Burges in Peter Ferriday's collection ''Victorian Architecture'', published in 1963. In 1966 Handley-Read followed this with a substantial article on the house for ''Country Life'', "Aladdin's Palace in Kensington". His notes on Burges formed the basis of Mordaunt Crook's centenary volume, ''William Burges and the High Victorian Dream'', published in 1981 and revised and reissued in 2013, in which Crook wrote at length on both the Tower House and its contents.
More recent coverage was given in ''London 3: North West'', the revision to the ''Buildings of England'' guide to London written by
Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (1 ...
and Bridget Cherry, published in 1991 (revised 2002). The house is referenced in Matthew Williams's ''William Burges'' (2004), and in ''Panoramas of Lost London'' by Philip Davies, published in 2011, which includes some of Francis Bedford's photographs of the house from 1885. In a chapter on the building in ''Great Houses of London'' (2012), the author James Stourton called The Tower House "the most singular of London houses, even including the
Soane Museum
Sir John Soane's Museum is a house museum, located next to Lincoln's Inn Fields in Holborn, London, which was formerly the home of neo-classical architect, John Soane. It holds many drawings and architectural models of Soane's projects, and ...
."
References
Notes
Citations
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External links
Cambridge University Special Collections: Living the Gothic Revival – William Burges and Tower HouseJohn Snow tours The Tower House for Channel 4 Newsof the exterior and interior of The Tower House from the Royal Institute of British ArchitectsElevation and sections of The Tower House from the Survey of LondonPhotographs of The Tower House from the Survey of LondonThe Arts & Crafts Home website – Colour photographs of The Tower House
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tower House, The
Gothic Revival architecture in London
Grade I listed houses in London
Houses completed in 1881
Houses in Holland Park
William Burges buildings