In London, Private Homes on Display By ANDREW FERREN

December 31, 2010
In London, Private Homes on Display By ANDREW FERREN

AS the last tinges of lavender faded from the fall sky, a group of people lingered for a moment beneath a flickering gas lamp on the threshold of an 18th-century London town house. Were it not for the cars on the street, it might have been a scene from a century ago.

But as I soon discovered, the real leap back in time doesn’t take place until you step through the doorway of the Dennis Severs House (18 Folgate Street; dennissevershouse.co.uk). Mr. Severs (1948-99) was an artist whose masterpiece was his own home, a 1724 Georgian house near East London’s Spitalfields market, once the city’s principal textile exchange. Here Mr. Severs — an American expatriate turned hard-core Anglophile — lived much as he would have in George III’s day, with fireplaces for heat and candles for light in a carefully curated, antiques-filled period environment that he ultimately decided to share with the public.

Rather than freezing the décor in one particular historical moment, Mr. Severs showed how a house would have evolved over successive generations in the hands of a single family — that of one Isaac Jervis, a fictitious Huguenot silk weaver of the sort who once populated Spitalfields. As family fortunes rose and fell, the parlor might get a Victorian face-lift, or the threadbare attic bedroom might be rented to lodgers. Heightening the ambience, the phantom family’s (recorded) rustlings and rumblings can be heard as visitors stroll among the home’s five levels. A visit is especially evocative in winter when the Monday night candlelight tours sell out and the aromas of mulled wine and spice cookies ramp up the atmosphere even further.

Such creations — the private realms and whims of inspired aesthetes put on public display — are something of a fetish in London. Indeed, house museums are to London what streetlights are to most other cities, which is to say everywhere. Perhaps in no other culture has the domestic interior served as such a canvas for personal expression. Homeowners and their architects and decorators have been emboldened to create some pretty fabulous environments over the last few centuries.

Whether visitors seek them or just happen upon them, it is worth taking the time to step inside these charming incubators of idiosyncrasy.

How else would one ever learn about Mah-Jongg, the ring-tailed lemur who in the 1930s and 40s had free reign of Eltham Palace, former home of King Henry VIII (not to mention Kings Henry IV and Henry II) near Greenwich (Court Yard, Eltham; elthampalace.org.uk). Mah-Jongg, whose second-story room at Eltham was decorated with painted scenes of bamboo forests, was the beloved pet of Stephen Courtauld, an heir to the British textile fortune, and his Italian-born wife, Virginia. They acquired the property — notable for its impressive 1470s Great Hall — in 1933 and commissioned the architects Seely and Paget to revamp the estate into a modern home suitable for their considerable entertaining needs.

Collaborating with several design firms, the architects delivered an elegant mix of styles that reflected the prevailing tastes of the day. The tone is brilliantly set in the Swedish Art Deco entry hall, designed by Rolf Engströmer and featuring a stunningly original concrete and glass dome. The room’s Australian black-bean paneling, with marquetry scenes of Venice and Stockholm (with the Courtaulds’ yacht moored in the harbor), is a showstopper. Throughout, Eltham was set up with “mod cons” (as modern conveniences were known) like an internal telephone system and a clock linked directly to the Greenwich observatory. Take a seat in the Venetian bedroom, paneled in walnut with mirrored insets, and watch the Courtaulds’ home movies of parties at home and trips around the world on their yacht. Mah-Jongg seems to have never been far from the action.

Mod cons take a back seat to the lure of the Orient at the Leighton House Museum (12 Holland Park Road; rbkc.gov.uk/leightonhousemuseum). Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-96), was one of the leading Victorian artists, known for his paintings of languid beauties like “Flaming June.” His home and studio at the edge of Holland Park in Kensington is one of the city’s most remarkable 19th-century abodes and a consummate summation of the period’s Orientalist taste. A frequent backdrop for films (like “Wings of the Dove”) and photo shoots, Leighton’s Arab Hall, showcasing his collection of more than 1,000 Islamic tiles, is among the most singular spaces in all London. The peacock-blue tiles that adorn much of the rest of the public rooms are by William De Morgan and unify the space with an air of opulence.

Begun in 1864 and expanded over subsequent decades, the whole place gleams anew as the house reopened in April after an exhaustive refurbishment designed to make it more faithful to its appearance in Leighton’s day. Displayed throughout are many of Leighton’s own works as well as those of his Victorian contemporaries like John Everett Millais, G. F. Watts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Clearly conceived to be Leighton’s best advertisement as a tastemaker, the house enabled the artist to entertain lavishly and often. Though guests never got too comfortable, as the house has just one bedroom — Leighton’s own.

Hemmed in by the whizzing traffic of Hyde Park Corner, Apsley House, also known as the Wellington Museum (Apsley House, 149 Piccadilly; 44-207- 499-5676), might escape the attention of those shuttling between Buckingham Palace and Harrod’s, but it’s worth a stop — if only to see “Mars the Peacemaker,” Canova’s colossal marble statue of Napoleon in the stair hall. In the audio guide, the present Duke of Wellington, who still lives upstairs part time, recalls how he had to take care not to knock the little bronze statuette of Victory out of Napoleon’s hand as he slid down the banister as a child.

With Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon in the Peninsular War and finally at Waterloo, he became Britain’s greatest military M.V.P. of all time. Titles (like Duke), properties (such as this one) and trinkets galore were showered upon him like tribute to a Roman emperor. In gratitude for getting Napoleon’s brother off his throne, the Spanish King Ferdinand VII let him keep works from the royal collection like Velázquez’s “Waterseller of Seville,” which now has pride of place in an upstairs gallery. The Duke also received sets of china and silverware from the crowned heads of Europe. He used these at the annual Waterloo banquets and they are now displayed on the ground floor. The suite of public rooms upstairs provide the backdrop for Wellington’s astonishing collection of paintings. Apparently the military hero did battle with his decorators as well as French tyrants, insisting on yellow silk wall hangings in the ballroom, though they more or less killed the effects of the expensive gilding on the moldings.

Perhaps no London house museum has a more devoted fan base than Sir John Soane’s Museum (13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields; soane.org). Soane (1753-1837) was among England’s greatest architects, and he spent the last 20 years of his life expanding his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the purchase of two neighboring houses. He opened it to the public before he died and arranged an act of Parliament to ensure it would “be kept as nearly as possible in the state that he shall leave it.” Currently, a £6 million project is under way to put on public view the rooms that have served as offices since the house museum opened in 1837.

The Soane Museum is emblematic of a certain brand of Britishness — quirky, highly organized and utterly charming. Passageways, stairways, even Soane’s dressing room are chock full of sculptures and architectural relics and his library of more than 10,000 volumes. Soane added domes, clerestories, skylights and cleverly placed mirrors wherever he could to bring natural light to all corners of the house — even the basement.

Not to be missed is Hogarth’s famous series of paintings depicting “The Rake’s Progress,” displayed on the walls of the picture gallery. The Hogarth paintings tell the tale of a fictitious Londoner, like Severs’s invented silk weaver Jervis. This one is Tom Rakewell, whose spendthrift ways lead to penury and madness. There is an irony in finding these moralistic images of a man who lost it all hanging in the home of a man who tripled the size of his home to keep pace with his prized collections.