Spencer House (London)
The Spencer House is a palatial mansion in St. James's, a district of the City of Westminster in London . It is located overlooking Green Park on the property adjacent to St James's Palace between Little Street and St James's Place . The area once belonged to the palace complex itself.
In 1756 the social life of John Spencer, 1st Earl Spencer , required building a large townhouse in London to underpin his position and status. The house was therefore commissioned by John Vardy , a student of the architect William Kent . He was responsible for the facade of the house in the Palladian style.
As early as 1758, James Stuart replaced Vardy as the architect of the project and, as a result of his studies of Greek architecture and especially of acanthus ornament in the Corinthian order , changed the interior decoration accordingly. This was a first example of the emerging neoclassical style in London, which from then on would dominate architecture for several decades. Some rooms were redesigned by Henry Holland around 1783 . In the 1840s, Philip Hardwick redecorated other rooms in the new Victorian style.
As the home of the Spencer family , the state rooms of the house became a popular meeting place for the London aristocracy and high society . The Spencer family lived in this house continuously until 1895 and only briefly during the first decades of the 20th century. In between and later the house was used as the London representative office of several companies and between 1926 and 1943 as the Ladies' Army and Navy Club . During the Battle of Britain in World War II, many of the furniture and decorative items made for the house were brought to safety in the ancestral home of the Althorp House family .
The house was leased to Christie's auction house in 1948, to the British Oxygen Company in 1956 and to the Economist Intelligence Unit in 1963 . 1985 John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer , the father of Princess Diana , rented the house to the family business of Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild or RIT Capital Partners as a " leasehold " for 96 years. The new beneficiaries then subjected the palace to a thorough renovation, which restored the state rooms and gardens to their original appearance. Spencer House is, alongside Lancaster House and the neighboring Bridgewater House , one of the last of the many private city palaces that once stood in central London.
As the headquarters of Rothschild Investment Trust Capital Partners, the house is not open to the general public, but its eight state rooms can be viewed on Sundays.
Individual evidence
Web links
- Official website
- Entry in the DiCamillo Companion to British & Irish Country Houses ( Memento from April 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 51 ° 30 ′ 18.8 ″ N , 0 ° 8 ′ 24.9 ″ W.