3-9, Harvard Road

This is a pair of semi-detached houses located at 3-9 Harvard Road, Chiswick, built between 1878 and 1879. The design is attributed to the prominent Victorian architect Richard Norman Shaw. The houses are constructed of stock brick with a tiled roof. They are two storeys high with an attic, and have a rectangular plan with long rear extensions.

The exterior of each pair is symmetrical. A panelled front door is located to the outside of a large, canted bay window with mullioned windows; the upper lights of these windows have centrally placed square panes. The front doors, featuring richly moulded panels (some now glazed), have overlights and are set within porches supported by slender consoles. A balcony at first floor level has railings of painted wood, with turned balusters topped with orb-shaped posts. Behind the railings are tripartite windows with square panes; the central French windows are topped with a fan-shaped glazed light. A narrow single window above the doors is a 9/9-pane sash with leaded lights featuring small square panes in the upper registers. The eaves have a deep, rendered plaster cavetto moulding which stops short of the ends and the centre. Segment-roofed dormer windows in the roof slope incorporate mullions and transoms; the lower window portions are sash windows, while the upper portions feature the small square leaded panes. Tall chimneystacks are positioned centrally. Small windows are present on the side elevations, with the upper portions of the gables being tile-hung. The rear elevations have large catslide roofs that sweep down to first floor height. Several Velux windows have been added, along with a conservatory to number 9.

The interior of the houses was not inspected, with the exception of number 9. Originally, the front rooms were drawing rooms with dining rooms behind, served by kitchens and sculleries in the rear extension. The first floor contained three bedrooms, and the attic four smaller rooms.

These houses closely resemble those designed by Richard Norman Shaw for Bedford Park, and designs were published in ‘The Building News’ in November 1877, allowing them to be regarded as Shaw designs. A lease for number 9, originally named Number 4 Avenue Villas, dates from October 1878. The houses, then known as Queen Anne Villas, were first recorded in rate books in 1883. They demonstrate the principles of fashionable domestic architecture and their original name highlighted their place in the Queen Anne Revival style. The houses have remained remarkably unaltered in terms of their frontages and represent an interesting continuation of the Bedford Park approach to house design within a more conventional residential area.