10 and 10a, Holland Park Road

House with studio, now two houses. Built in 1892-3 by architects W.E. and F. Brown for Sir James Jebusa Shannon (1862-1923), a painter of figure subjects and society portraits. Orange brick with stone banding and dressings; tiled roofs. Dutch Revival style.

The building is arranged as two adjacent units: No. 10a to the left, and No. 10 to the right.

No. 10a is two storeys with basement and parapet, topped by a pair of end chimneys. To the left is a full-height five-sided bay with tall windows to each storey. To the right are a Venetian window at ground floor and a three-light window above. A door with stone quoin surround is set back and to the left. The return elevation has a hung tile first floor with a moulded brick course over plain brick ground floor, a canted oriel, and two small twentieth-century additions to the rear. The north elevation displays a blind oriel on stone brackets.

No. 10 features a wide Dutch gable with scrolled stone coping and a central stone plaque with sundial and quoins. A small two-storey bay sits to the left under a steep pitched hipped roof. To the right is an advanced canted two-storey entrance bay with a door beneath a stone plaque and continuous first-floor windows. To the far right, a two-storey range has an advanced section under a hipped roof with central three-light windows to both storeys, the ground-floor window set under a segmental red brick arch. Behind this, the rear range has a castellated parapet, with a first-floor window to the far right beneath an ogee arch.

The interior of 10a includes the studio, a large full-height space with tall north windows and exposed trusses. The interior of No. 10 features a curved staircase with cast-iron balusters and spiral newel.

Shannon was a prominent American artist who came to London in 1878 and studied at the Royal Academy of Art under Edward Poynter until 1891. In 1891 he acquired land in Holland Park that included a surviving mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse from the Holland Estate. The architects W.E. and F. Brown designed the rebuilding of this 1859 farmhouse and the addition of a studio. Plans were approved by the ground landlord, the Earl of Ilchester, and executed by builders Thomas Gregory and Company. An addition was made to the north-east of the studio in 1908, the same year the house was re-numbered from 3 to 10. The Dutch Revival style reflects Shannon's love of Holland, where he travelled annually on painting holidays. The house was divided from the studio after Shannon's death in 1923 to form two separate houses. American artist Karl Anderson, visiting around 1913, noted that the studios contained uncompleted portraits and described a studio built specifically to house a Venetian ceiling brought from Venice two years earlier, as well as an old Italian balcony overlooking the houses of the late George Watts and Sir Frederick Leighton.