Mortimer House
Mortimer House was built in 1886–8 for Edward Howley Palmer, a merchant with Dent, Palmer and Company of Gresham House, Old Broad Street, City, and a director and former governor of the Bank of England.
Largely secluded behind a high brick wall, Mortimer House exudes an air of mystery and surprise amid the surrounding terraces of South Kensington. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, it is still in private occupation. Its style is an amalgam of Tudor and Jacobean in red brickwork diapered with blue, with stone mullioned-and-transomed windows, a multiplicity of gables of various shapes, some of them stepped, crested with statuary of griffins or bears supporting shields, and clusters of tall, decorated brick chimneystacks. Inside there is a predictable eclecticism of style, ranging from Jacobean in the long hallway containing an oak open-well staircase with twisted balusters and wide handrail to Adamesque in the double drawing-room at the front. The fittings include fine marble chimneypieces in a late-eighteenth-century manner. A room on the first floor may originally have been used as a chapel. Several changes have been made to the decorative schemes since the house was built, some of them quite recently, and a long conservatory-cum-swimming-pool has been added to the west side of the house, where the detached stables (now converted into garages) with stepped gables and a turret with a conical roof are also situated.
[British History Online]
Mortimer House
Mortimer House was built in 1886–8 for Edward Howley Palmer, a merchant with Dent, Palmer and Company of Gresham House, Old Broad Street, City, and a director and former governor of the Bank of England.
Largely secluded behind a high brick wall, Mortimer House exudes an air of mystery and surprise amid the surrounding terraces of South Kensington. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, it is still in private occupation. Its style is an amalgam of Tudor and Jacobean in red brickwork diapered with blue, with stone mullioned-and-transomed windows, a multiplicity of gables of various shapes, some of them stepped, crested with statuary of griffins or bears supporting shields, and clusters of tall, decorated brick chimneystacks. Inside there is a predictable eclecticism of style, ranging from Jacobean in the long hallway containing an oak open-well staircase with twisted balusters and wide handrail to Adamesque in the double drawing-room at the front. The fittings include fine marble chimneypieces in a late-eighteenth-century manner. A room on the first floor may originally have been used as a chapel. Several changes have been made to the decorative schemes since the house was built, some of them quite recently, and a long conservatory-cum-swimming-pool has been added to the west side of the house, where the detached stables (now converted into garages) with stepped gables and a turret with a conical roof are also situated.
[British History Online]