No. 13
Architect possibly Matthew Brettingham, senior. Probably built 1735–7. Third-storey windows and parapet
altered and chimney-stack added later
On 11 June 1675 the site of this house was
agreed to be granted to Sir Thomas Clarges, at a
reserved ground-rent of £19 17s. 10d. per
annum. (ref. 266) In December 1677 St. Albans and
Baptist May performed this covenant, a little
belatedly, by granting the site to William Livesey
in trust for Clarges. (ref. 267) The house had been built
by 1676, when it appeared in the ratebook in the
occupation of Laurence Hyde, Clarendon's son
and later Earl of Rochester, who was also rated
for the house in the following year: for most of
this time he was residing out of England on
diplomatic missions.
The Clarges retained the freehold for some sixty
years, but the history of the house, like that of its
neighbour in the north-west corner of the square,
No. 14, is one of frequent changes of inhabitant. (fn. a)
Sutton Nicholls's view of c. 1722 (Plate 128)
shows that it then still retained its original external
appearance. An inventory of 1729, when the
Duke of Beaufort took a lease of the house, (ref. 268)
does not give any very interesting information
about the house, but mentions garden furnishings:
'a Gilt Figure upon a Stone Pedestal—two Leaden
Figures upon the Wall and two Urns—A Leaden
Cestern and pumps—A Garden Settle'. In 1735
George Clarges sold the house for £3200 to Sir
Henry Liddell (later Lord Ravensworth). (ref. 269)
From 1734 to 1737 inclusive the house stood
empty and was probably rebuilt at this period, (ref. 6)
substantially in its present form, for the incoming
owner, who about this time was described as
living 'at a great expense'. (ref. 270) Lord Ravensworth,
and later his widow, occupied the house until
1794. In 1753 he paid Matthew Brettingham,
senior, £21 (and/or 25 guineas) 'for Plans Drawings and attendance . . . in St. James's-Square'. (ref. 271)
No further detail of any work done at this time is
known nor whether the payment may have been
retrospective. (fn. b)
In about 1784 John Soane supervised the painting of the exterior of the house for the Dowager
Lady Ravensworth. (ref. 272) For most of 1795–7 the
house was empty (ref. 6) before it was taken by the third
Duke of Roxburgh; some redecoration of the
drawing-room was carried out at this time. (ref. 273) The
third Duke kept his fine and famous library here,
where it was sold by auction in 1812. (fn. c) Ackermann's view taken in that year (Plate 131) shows
the front substantially as at present, although the
third-storey windows and the parapet have since
been altered. The Roxburghs then vacated the
house and it was held on further short tenancies
until 1836 when it was sold for £17,500 by the
trustees of the Duke of Atholl to the Windham
Club, (ref. 274) which remained here until 1941.
The Windham House Club was established in
1828 as a 'place of meeting for a Society of Gentlemen all connected with each other by a common
bond of literary or personal acquaintance'. It took
its name from the house, No. 106 Pall Mall,
where the Right Hon. William Windham, M.P.,
had lived for a number of years prior to his death
in 1810. This house may have been the first home
of the club, but if so only for a few months, as it
occupied the site of the Travellers' club-house,
the building of which began early in 1830. In
1829 the Windham House Club migrated to
No. 10 St. James's Square, changing its name
to the Windham Club in the same year; it
remained there until its removal to No. 13 in
1836. (ref. 275)
In 1846 two green marble chimneypieces by
W. T. Kelsey were installed (ref. 276) and some redecoration was presumably carried out after a fire
in 1850. (ref. 277) In about 1863–6 David Brandon
built additional rooms at the back which were replaced by a coffee-room in 1910. (ref. 278) Some structural work was supervised in about 1877 by the
District Surveyor. (ref. 279) Another fire in 1884 was
followed by the conversion of the front room on
the third floor into a billiard-room: it was perhaps
at this time that the third-storey front windows
were enlarged. In 1891 the library and little
drawing-room on the principal storey were thrown
into one. (ref. 280) The appearance of the house in
1895 is recorded by Dasent (page 136). The
chimney-stack in the centre of the parapet has
been added since, perhaps in 1910. (ref. 281)
In 1941 the Windham Club left the house and
was accommodated by the Travellers' Club. In
1945 it amalgamated with the Marlborough and
Orleans Clubs, to form the Marlborough-Windham Club (see page 344) (ref. 282) which sold the house
in the square in 1950. (ref. 283)
Although much altered inside, and to a lesser
extent outside, the house is substantially that built
probably between 1735 and 1737 and perhaps
from Matthew Brettingham's designs. Considerable additions have been made on the north and
west sides, but the original plan of the house has
not been obscured.
The plan is a deep rectangle, equally divided on
the ground storey by a stout wall, with a front
and back room on the east, and a front and back
room flanking the service stair on the west. Each
room has two windows, and a fireplace in the
party-wall, except the west front room which is
the entrance hall, with one window west of the
doorway and an archway in the west wall opening
to the main staircase, which occupies an oblong
compartment lying behind the north wall of
No. 14. In front, on the principal storey, is the lofty
drawing-room, three windows wide, approached
through an ante-room from the main staircase,
and at the back were two rooms, now united. The
two back rooms of the chamber storey have retained their original form, but the front part of
this storey, which is raised above the drawingroom, has been remodelled.
Brettingham may well have designed the front
(Plate 149a), which is a simple composition in the
English Palladian style, three storeys high and
four windows wide, with the doorway flanked by
one window on the west and two on the east. The
ground storey is now faced with stone, evenly
coursed and chamfer-jointed, with voussoirs and a
plain keystone to the round-arched doorway, and
to each straight-headed window. The upper face
is of brick, including the die of the pedestal to the
principal storey, but this brickwork has been resurfaced, stained black, and mock-pointed to give
an all-over pattern of headers. The tall openings
of the four evenly spaced windows in the principal
storey now reach to the plinth of the pedestal, but
this must be an alteration involving the removal of
a blind balustrade or part of the pedestal. Each
opening is dressed with stone—a moulded architrave, narrow pulvino-frieze and cornice—and is
furnished with a segmental-fronted railing of
ornamental ironwork. The chamber-storey windows also have been lengthened, but each has its
original frame of a moulded stone architrave,
broken in at the sides. A block-cornice and high
blocking-course of stone finish the front, to which
has been added a central chimney-stack of brick,
flanked by consoles and crowned with a broken
segmental pediment of stone.
The oblong entrance hall has one window to
the west of the door in the south (front) wall, a
door at each end of the north wall (that on the
west serving a cupboard), a door in the middle of
the east wall opening to the east front room, and in
the west wall is a wide round-arched opening
leading to the main staircase. Apart from the lincrusta ceiling and the Adamesque arches and
panelled tympana added to the north-wall doorways, the decorations are original and Brettingham's hand is immediately suggested by the simple
pedestal and the Doric triglyphed entablature of
the walls.
The east front and back rooms have been united,
with an Ionic screen of three bays replacing the
original wall, and the decorations are modern
except for an enriched plaster cornice of about
1800. Each room, however, contains an original
chimneypiece of white marble, in the true Palladian taste of c. 1740. That in the front room
(Plate 149c) is an Inigo Jones design, used by
Kent in the south-east room at Chiswick and in
the 'old wing' bedchamber at Holkham. It has
an egg-and-dart ovolo moulding to frame the
opening, and a wide architrave-surround eared
and shouldered at the head, decorated with a
female mask between drapery festoons that loop
over the top of the architrave and reappear
through bosses in the angles, to fall in pendants on
the jambs. The back room chimneypiece has an
eared architrave with enriched mouldings, a plain
frieze broken by a tablet carved with a wreath
over crossed palms, and a cornice-shelf resting on
scroll-consoles above panelled jambs.
The west back room has been divided by partitions, but it retains the original pedestal of wood,
with a plain die and carved mouldings to the
skirting and cornice-rail, and the windows are
furnished with shutters of raised-and-fielded
panels in enriched moulded frames, cased in ovolomoulded architraves carved with scallop-shells and
darts. The white marble chimneypiece has an enriched architrave, a frieze carved with foliagescrolls flanking a plain tablet, and an enriched
cornice-shelf with a fluted cavetto below the
corona.
The main stair (Plate 149b) begins with curtail
steps on the east side, and rises with stone steps
cantilevered from the north, west and south walls
of the compartment, finishing at a gallery landing
across the east side. The wrought-iron railing,
typically early Georgian, is composed of scrolly
vase-profiled openwork standards, one to each
step, finished with a moulded handrail of mahogany
which ramps up at each turn.<Thomas Wragg, smith, 1736/7, for Sir Henry Liddell.> In the south wall of
the ground-storey stage, framed in a recessed bandarchitrave with a plain keyblock, is a wide apse
containing a fireplace. This is furnished with a
'Regency' chimneypiece, following the curve of
the wall and composed of a panelled lintel and
jambs with lion-mask stops. The walls of the
compartment are plain but for the fluted bandcourse at gallery level, and they are finished with
an anthemion frieze and an enriched cornice.
Above are four plain tympana, formed by the pendentives supporting the oval saucer-dome, which
is fringed with an anthemion border and contains
an oval skylight. All this plasterwork appears to
be of late Georgian date.
The front drawing-room and its ante-room are
loftier than the back rooms of the principal storey,
but there is nothing to show that this is due to an
alteration. Some evidence suggesting that the
present height is the original is offered by the design of the drawing-room ceiling, which is in the
Jones-Kent manner, being divided by guillocheornamented ribs into a simple arrangement of
compartments—a central oval surrounded by
oblongs. The plasterwork, however, looks much
later than early Georgian (although it may be a
restoration) and it is combined with an enriched
cornice above a 'Grecian' anthemion frieze. The
walls are plain above the simple pedestal, but the
large doorway in the middle of the west end wall
has a 'Grecian' doorcase, with anthemion-capped
pilasters supporting a bold entablature and a
blocking-course. Although the doorway in the
north wall has a moulded architrave, this is surmounted by an entablature to match that of the
west door. The fireplace in the east end wall has a
white marble chimneypiece—a delicate design in
James Wyatt's manner—finely carved with vaseshaped lamps hanging from ribbon bows on the
jambs, and a frieze of anthemion ornament extending between frieze-blocks with paterae, below
the enriched cornice-shelf. The tall oblong
chimney-glass, in a gilt frame of Regency design,
is echoed by the pier-glasses between the three
windows, these being dressed with gilt-wood curtain boxes.
The back rooms on the principal storey have
been united and greatly altered, but the windows
retain their original shutters and ovolo architraves,
with carved enrichments like those of the groundstorey windows. In the west room is a white
marble chimneypiece of Palladian character (Plate
149d), similar to one designed by Inigo Jones for
old Somerset House, and possibly carved after the
engraved representation of the Jones chimneypiece on Plate 10 of Vardy's Some Designs of Mr.
Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent. The fireplace
opening is framed with a wide flat architrave, bordered with enriched mouldings and eared and
shouldered to form a square at each top corner and
an oblong in the middle of the lintel. Each of these
breaks contains a scrolled cartouche of Jacobean
character, with heavy foliage pendants hanging
from those in the corner squares, and palm
branches flanking that in the middle.
The stone service stair, with a simple railing of
wrought-iron bars and a mahogany handrail,
gives access to the chamber storey. The two back
rooms are similar, and each retains its original
form and much of the original decoration. The
walls are furnished with a wooden pedestal and the
face above was probably hung with silk or paper,
but is now boarded and formed into panels with
raised mouldings. The six-panelled doors and
panelled window shutters are framed with moulded
architraves, and in each room the plain ceiling is
bordered with an enriched modillioned cornice of
plaster. The front room, reached from the stair
landing by a short flight of steps, has been entirely
reconstructed and is of no interest.