Lansdowne House

Lansdowne House stands on a quiet corner of Fitzmaurice Place, just south of Berkeley Square in the City of Westminster. It is the last fragment of a grand 18th-century town house built for John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute, and finished in 1768 for William Petty, the 2nd Earl of Shelburne. The house passed to the Petty-FitzMaurice family in 1784 when Shelburne became Marquess of Lansdowne. Robert Adam designed its interiors, and sculptors such as Thomas Carter the Younger carved the chimney-pieces. Over the centuries the house hosted glittering political and literary gatherings attended by Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde and Henry James. The building’s greatest claim is its sequence of Adam rooms, once counted among the finest in England. In the 19th century it was let to three future prime ministers and to William Waldorf Astor, reputedly the richest man in America at the time. In 1931 half of the east wing was demolished to make way for Fitzmaurice Place, yet the surviving Adam interiors were preserved and now form the heart of the Lansdowne Club. The club still occupies the reduced house, with a 1930s Art Deco extension added in the 1930s. Visitors enter through a modest doorway into a sequence of 18th-century reception rooms lined with Adam’s delicate plasterwork and original chimney-pieces. One drawing room was removed in the 1930s and now stands in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while the dining room is installed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Beyond the club’s interiors lies Fitzmaurice Place, a quiet cul-de-sac where the house’s former garden front once looked out over Berkeley Square’s green expanse.