20, Hanover Square

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TQ 2881 SE 56/125

HANOVER SQUARE No 20

14.1.70

GV II*

Substantial terraced town house. Circa 1718-20 by Nicholas Dubois, altered internally and redecorated c.1785 probably by Samuel Wyatt, circa 1890 porch added by William Flockhart, 1910 additional corridor, offices, sales room and auction room at rear by E Vincent Harris. Darkened yellow stock brick and slate mansard roof with dormers.

Four storeys, attic and basement. Five windows. Asymmetrically placed distyle in antis Doric porch with balustrade over. Architraved sashes; first floor with cornices and bracketed sills, second floor case iron window guards and bracketed sills, third floor cast iron guards with stucco dies and bracketed sills. Stuccoed band and first floor level and third floor sill band. Projecting modillion cornice surmounted by stone balustrade. Attached cast iron railing to areas.

Fine interior with many high quality moulded ceilings and cornices. Hall with open well, full height cantilevered stone stair having lead trellis work banister panels with paterae at angles, interspersed by vertical panels of palmettes in mandorlas; moulded mahogany handrail. Glazed dome above stairwell; lunettes with fictive drapery and roundels, spandrels with carved eagles and cameo pendants, dentil cornice to landing. Ground floor corridor barrel vaulted and coffered. Ground floor left front room with Ionic screen, fine moulded ceiling and cornice; two colour marble fire surround of Doric columns and entablature with central carved panel; doors with enriched raised field panels.

Sales room at rear (some C20 partitioning), large, rectangular with attached Tuscan columns on long walls; girders span the room between these to support walls of auction room over; restrained detailing. Country Houses department, room with octagonal opening to dome with circular glazed centre. First floor rooms with moulded ceilings and marble fire surrounds, especially front left hand room of white marble with carved figures of women with garlands of flowers standing on circular alters decorated with bucrania, all in shallow relief. Auction room in the form of a Greek cross with very shallow arms over which a flat ceiling. Central square has pendentives and a glazed dome over with triglyph frieze around the inside of base with bucrania, modelled in high relief, in metopes. Walls, without windows, have simple panels; articulated by Doric pilasters. Astragal and echinus of capitals carried on right around room as an architrave. Entablature proper of two fascias

Listing NGR: TQ2885781055