Home House (Courtauld Institute)

This is a terraced town mansion located on the north side of Portman Square, built between 1773 and 1776 by Robert Adam for Elizabeth, Countess of Home. It retains an exceptional Adam interior and is designated as a building of group value. The elevation was designed as a unified composition with the adjacent building at No. 21. The house is four storeys high, with a later attic floor, and has a basement. It has five windows across the front. A semicircular arched doorway is in the second bay from the right, sheltered by a projecting painted stone porch with slender fluted Doric columns, a dentil cornice, and a shallow pediment with a die-acroterion. The ground floor windows have flat gauged arches and are set within a blind arcade with stuccoed roundels in the spandrels. The first floor has recessed French casements, while the upper floors have recessed sash windows, all with flat gauged arches. Painted stone guilloche bands are above the first floor, and form the sill band to the second floor, with painted stone panels framing garlands and paterae in between. A cornice sits above the third floor, and a stucco balustrade is on the later attic. A continuous, cast iron balcony with a simple geometric pattern runs across the first floor. Wrought iron area railings feature urn finials. The rear garden elevation includes a bowed, stucco, Ionic columned portico-porch, recessed sash windows, a Venetian window composition to the ground and first floors, four Coade stone circular relief medallions below the second floor windows, and a cornice below the fourth attic floor, all topped by a balustraded parapet. The interior is of exceptional quality and features plasterwork by Joseph Rose, inset painted panels and roundels by Zucchi and Angelica Kaufmann, and demonstrates Adam’s inventive use of varied apsidal and screened volumes. A spectacular circular tower-stairwell, topped by a dome, is located behind the entrance hall, with stairs rising in one arm to a niched landing and returning in two curved arms to the first floor, with moulded soffits. A gallery is at the third floor, and the wrought iron and gilded balustrade is of openwork pilaster pattern with anthemion and bucrania enrichment. The principal rooms – the front and back drawing rooms, music room, and back parlour – are decorated with delicate colour schemes, attenuated architectural detailing, and small-scale ornament, alongside statuary marble and scagliola chimneypieces.