71, South Audley Street W1

This is an end-terrace town house located at 71 South Audley Street, Westminster, built in 1736 by Edward Shepherd. Around 1740-1750, an overhanging projection was added to the South Street facade. The house is constructed of painted brick with painted stone dressings, likely originally stuccoed, and has a slate roof. It is a well-preserved example of Shepherd's Palladian style and was likely intended as part of a larger, unexecuted Palladian composition for numbers 71 to 75.

The house has three main storeys over a basement, with an attic storey topped by a pediment gable facing the front. The single bay pediment returns to South Street, with a slightly advanced pedimented centre and a first-floor section that projects and overlaps the centre. This projection is supported by four Tuscan piers and two columns in front of the doorway, which has a rusticated shallow Gibbs surround with projecting alternate voussoirs to the arch.

The South Audley Street facade uses variations on the Venetian window theme – the ground floor features Gibbs rustication to Doric columns, the first floor uses Ionic pilasters, and the second floor has a truncated, pedimented version. The attic window has an eared architrave surround with a stucco finish that sweeps down to the foot. A sill band runs along the first floor, and a stone modillion-bracket cornice sits above the second floor. The rear elevation has an early 20th-century through-storey stuccoed canted bay, but retains the original pediment-gabled attic.

The front garden is enclosed by spearhead area railings with torch finials and openwork obelisk standards, topped with a wrought iron overthrow. These railings and the garden/patio wall extend to number 28 South Street, where a stuccoed Palladian tripartite composition with a pediment gable, broken by a central piece with a niche, and surmounted by a truncated obelisk chimney, serves as a backdrop to the view from the house. Later neo-classical relief panels decorate the “wings” of this feature and are arranged as a tondo beneath the pediment, originally designed to disguise the kitchen flues.

The interior retains several original features on the ground and first floors, including a stone staircase with a late 18th-century iron balustrade within a fully panelled hall. There are three plasterwork ceilings typical of Shepherd’s work, a dining room with sunk plaster panels, five pedimented overmantels to chimney pieces, and a front ground floor room featuring a fine composition of pedimented bookcases flanking a chimney piece.