The Tower House

The Tower House
Middlesex
The Tower House
Location
Grid reference:	TQ24827941
Location:	51°29’59"N, 0°12’11"W
Village:	Holland Park
History
Address:	29 Melbury Road
	Built 1875–1881
For:	himself by William Burges
Information

The Tower House, 29 Melbury Road, is a late-Victorian townhouse in the Holland Park district of Middlesex, on a corner of Melbury Road, just north of Kensington High Street. It was built by the architect and designer William Burges 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 mediæval 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 Cumberland, 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, also in Glamorgan.

The house is a Grade I listed building.

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. 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 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 Zodiac settle, the Golden Bed and the Red Bed, are now in museums such as the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Higgins in Bedford and the Victoria and Albert in London, while others are in private collections.

History

Design, construction and craftsmanship, 1875–78

The Tower House in 1878

In 1863, William Burges gained his first major architectural commission, Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral in 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 rivalled 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, the owner of the Holland Estate. The ground rent was £100 a year. 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, 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 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 and Frederick Weekes were employed to decorate the walls with murals, and Campbell and Smith of Southampton Row had responsibility for most of the painted decoration. Marks painted birds above the frieze 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 and Company of Long Acre, with initial designs by Horatio Walter Lonsdale.

Burges to Graham, 1878–1962

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 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 Abbott McNeill Whistler|James Whistler]]. 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.

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.

Later owners

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 [have] entered into a long lease conditional upon the house being put into a state of good repair." The purchaser of the lease was Lady Jane Turnbull, daughter of William Grey, 9th Earl of Stamford, who initiated a programme of restoration.

In 1969, the actor Richard Harris bought the lease, and employed the original decorators, Campbell Smith & Company Ltd., to carry out restoration, using Burges's drawings from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 1972, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin bought the lease.

Architecture

"The house was exactly as he (Burges) had made and furnished it – massive, learned, glittering, amazing [...] It was strange and barbarously splendid; none more than he could be minutely intimate with the thought of old art or more saturated with a passion for colour, sheen and mystery. Here were silver and jade, onyx and malachite, bronze and ivory, jewelled casements, rock crystal orbs, marble inland with precious metal; lustre iridescence and colour everywhere; vermillion and black, gold and emerald; everywhere device and symbolism, and a fusion of Eastern feeling with his style."

The architectural historian William Lethaby describing the Tower House

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 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 (a circular turret) 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 2,500 feet, Burges went about its construction on a grand scale. The architect Richard Norman Shaw|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, 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, and the interiors are inspired from examples at Cardiff Castle. The house has two main floors, with a basement below and a garret 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 of the house: A – kitchen; B – library; C – drawing room; D – dining room; E – hall; F – main bedroom; G – armoury; H – bathroom; I – guest room

The architectural writer Bridget Cherry wrote that "the sturdy exterior gives little hint of the fantasy [Burges] created inside", interiors which the art historian and Burges scholar Charles Handley-Read described as "at once opulent, aggressive, obsessional, enchanting, their grandeur border[ing] on 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 [and] quite unlike anything designed by his contemporaries".

Garden

The garden at the rear of the house featured raised flowerbeds which Dakers described as being "planned according to those pleasances depicted in mediæval 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.

Outside links

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about The Tower House)

• Cambridge University Special Collections: Living the Gothic Revival – William Burges and Tower House
• John Snow tours The Tower House for Channel 4 News
• of the exterior and interior of The Tower House from the Royal Institute of British Architects
• Elevation and sections of The Tower House from the Survey of London
• Photographs of The Tower House from the Survey of London
• The Arts & Crafts Home website – Colour photographs of The Tower House

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