Chelsea

This is a postcard produced and published by H. Flack of 315, King’s Road, Chelsea, SW3. Mr. Flack’s shop was a newsagent where he sold other company’s postcards as well as his own, he was not very prolific. The postcard shows Dr. Phene’s House of Mystery, it was also called the Gingerbread House. It was on the corner of Oakley Street and Upper Cheyne Row. Dr. John Samuel Phene was an Architect, Property developer, collector of pagan statues, poet, Scholar and most of all, an eccentric in the fine old English tradition. He started to build the house in 1903, it was never completed, and he never lived there, he had a house in Oakley Street part of the street had been designed and built by Dr. Phene, also Phene Street and Margaretta Street and Terrace. In 1850 he had designed and built the “Phene Arms”, it is now just called “The Phene” in Phene Street. He stored his collection of statues in the garden of the house and the statues on the front of the house were painted, the delays in completing the house were put down to difficulties with the Chelsea Vestry. Dr. Phene was a founding member of the Huguenot Society which still exists today, it was said that in the early nineteenth century that a quarter of all English people were descended from a Huguenot ancestor. He named the house “Renaissance du Chateau de Savenay”, a recreation of his family’s home in France, although this was a bit far fetched even for him. Dr. Phene died in 1912 aged ninety and the house was demolished in 1924.

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