There are worse methods to spend a winter afternoon by the hearth than wandering the rooms depicted within the architectural historian Steven Brindle’s huge and bewitching London Misplaced Interiors: the properties of noblemen, society figures, eccentrics, artists, and some mere millionaire stockbrokers and diamond sellers. The rooms are showcases for opulence, however typically they’re much less about particular person style than the means to rent the most costly and trendy inside decorators of the day. In a block of luxurious flats constructed for Edwina Mountbatten on Park Lane, the rooms of Rebecca Sieff—whose husband would develop a modest, inherited retail firm into Marks & Spencer—had been embellished by the architect Edwin Lutyens and inside designer Syrie Maugham, a group well-known for cold all-white rooms, whereas the Mountbattens upstairs had vibrant Rex Whistler murals.
What these wildly totally different areas have in frequent is that they’re gone. Of all of the buildings nonetheless standing, just one is occupied by the unique household: Apsley Home, “#1, London”, as soon as the house of the “Iron” Duke of Wellington of Waterloo fame. Partly a museum, it’s nonetheless dwelling to the current duke, who contributes a not significantly illuminating foreword to this quantity. In any other case, many of the buildings and all of the rooms have vanished. Many had been blown to smithereens within the Blitz, however, as Brindle feedback sadly, any survivors “had been dinosaurs”, too huge to warmth or workers, their bells calling servants who would by no means once more clear eating tables set for 40. Builders flattened many extra, and the place buildings survive, altering fashions swept away the interiors, though sometimes one senses Brindle standing on tiptoe peering over backyard partitions the place he suspects parts of unique schemes might survive.
Gutted and gone
Many contents went with the rooms. Serge Chermayeff—the Russian-born architect and creator with Erich Mendelsohn of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill—designed an elegantly plain Fashionable Motion inside in 1937 inside the Georgian partitions of 5 Connaught Place in Bayswater, knocked by vertically to type a double-height lounge centered on a big Picasso. The home, in Brindle’s terse abstract of its destiny, “was severely broken by bombing, and subsequently deserted and demolished”. The Picasso vanished with its dwelling.
There have been some stunning survivals. Probably the most startling of the extraordinary decorations of Mulberry Home in Westminster, an Artwork Deco transformation by the architects Darcy Braddell and Humphry Deane of a 1911 Lutyens home, was additionally thought blitzed. Embedded within the foil-covered partitions, the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger contributed Scandal, a bas reduction of bare lovers clinging collectively surrounded by malevolent faces hissing disapproval. It was commissioned by Henry Mond, an inheritor to the Imperial Chemical Industries fortune, and his spouse Gwen to characterize society response to their earlier ménage à trois with the author Gilbert Cannan. Thought misplaced, it resurfaced in a New York public sale in 2008 and is now on show within the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Main George Wallace Carpenter’s lavatory at 28 Ashley Place, Westminster, in 1893Picture © Historic England
Lots of the rooms are simply an excessive amount of: an excessive amount of cash, an excessive amount of furnishings, an excessive amount of stuff. The uncommon pictures of loos and kitchens—such because the one taken in 1893, which exhibits the luxurious mahogany-panelled bathtub at 28 Ashley Place (the house of Main George Wallace Carpenter), or Mrs Vernon Tate’s pleasant Thirties kitchen at 7 Princes Gate—present a welcome breather from the dizzying procession of drawing rooms with no swag unfringed, no mirror ungilded.
Descent into vulgarity
Two remarkably plain Thirties rooms—solely softened by a couple of chintz-covered armchairs and a teddy bear—had been the brand new day and evening nurseries of a one-year-old child, the longer term Queen Elizabeth II, when her mother and father, then Duke and Duchess of York, moved into the grand 18th-century 145 Piccadilly. The household left—presumably with the chandeliers of their baggage—in 1936 to maneuver throughout Inexperienced Park to Buckingham Palace, when the duke reluctantly turned King George VI on the abdication of his brother. The home barely outlived them. The longer term queen wrote that she wished the bomb that destroyed it had hit the German Embassy as an alternative: “I imagine the inside has been made very vulgar by that horrible Ribbentrop & it could have been no loss.”
Clearly one yearns to see that vulgar inside, and 200 pages additional on, this fascinating e-book permits simply that, the startling remodelling of seven Carlton Home Terrace by Adolf Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer. It was his solely work exterior Germany, for Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Third Reich’s ambassador to Britain. The work, at a price of 5 million Reichsmarks, was celebrated in 1937 with a reception for 1,400 visitors. Brindle believes the images had been taken in 1939 when the Crown Property swiftly reclaimed the constructing, but it surely nonetheless contained its swastika-bordered stair carpet, German furnishings like that chosen by Hitler for his Bavarian retreat, Berchtesgaden, and a fire with a swastika frieze, which astonishingly survived till 1964. Some losses are mourned greater than others.
• London Misplaced Interiors, by Steven Brindle. Printed by Historic England/Atlantic Publishing,416pp, 650 illustrations, £50 (hb), 4 November 2024
