The Tower House
The Tower House, 29 Melbury Road, is a late-Victorian townhouse in the Holland Park district of Kensington and Chelsea, London, 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 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, 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. It was designated a Grade I listed building 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. 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.
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 Stavordale Lodge and next to Woodland House, built for the artist Luke Fildes. The development of Melbury Road in the grounds of Little Holland House created an art colony in Holland Park, the Holland Park Circle. Its most prominent member, Frederic, Lord Leighton, lived at Leighton House, 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
In 1863, William Burges gained his first major architectural commission, Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral, 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, 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, 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 Saunders 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 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. The Tower House was designated a Grade I listed building on 29 July 1949.
Betjeman to Turnbull, 1962–69
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 entered into a long lease conditional upon the house being put into a state of good repair." In March 1965, the Historic Buildings Council obtained a preservation order on the house, enabling the purchaser of the lease, Lady Jane Turnbull, daughter of William Grey, 9th Earl of Stamford, 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
The actor Richard Harris bought the lease for £75,000 in 1969 after discovering that the American entertainer Liberace had made an offer but had not put down a deposit. Reading of the intended sale in the Evening Standard, 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 guitarist, bought the house from Harris in 1972 for £350,000, outbidding the musician David Bowie. 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 singer Robbie Williams, 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.