Clifton Lodge

Clifton Lodge is a detached villa on the north side of St Margaret's Drive in Twickenham, probably incorporating parts of an earlier orangery. Built between 1852 and 1865 in Italianate style, it is constructed of stock brick with stuccoed eaves cornice and band between floors, topped by a hipped roof with brick chimneystacks. The building is two storeys with seven windows facing south east and irregular fenestration on other elevations.

The principal south east elevation features a projecting central bay with a tripartite window to the first floor. All first floor windows have marginal glazing and panelled wooden blind boxes. The ground floor displays cambered arched windows connected by stuccoed impost blocks. The elliptical-arched windows found only at ground level, combined with the set-back first floor brickwork separated by a deep frieze and cornice, suggest the upper floor is an addition to an earlier building. The central doorcase contains a rectangular fanlight and a twentieth-century replacement door with ten panels, flanked by sidelights with horns. The entrance preserves a large and unusual early to mid nineteenth-century wooden portico with a hipped leaded roof, moulded wooden cornice with a row of pendants, six wooden columns made up of strips of wood, lattice-work panels, and a round-headed arch with a pattern of circles connected to lattice-work panels by spandrels with fan motifs. The large scale and slight obscuring of the central first floor windows suggest this portico was reused from another building. The right side elevation contains sash windows and a canted ground floor bay with horned sashes. The left side elevation has cement render to the first floor and a cement copy of one of the panels of the Parthenon frieze.

Interior details include plaster ceiling roses, wooden window shutters, panelled doors, and chimneypieces of mid nineteenth-century date in the front rooms. The absence of openings between front and rear rooms suggests a residential conversion of a single-storey shallow building rather than a wholly new mid nineteenth-century villa. A late nineteenth-century wooden staircase features square newel posts and square stick balusters, with a staircase window containing marginal glazing and coloured glass. Six-panelled doors are also present. The north easternmost ground floor room has a segmental arch supported on Ionic pilasters and a large late nineteenth-century cast iron fireplace with elaborate pilasters. Original sashes have marginal glazing; the service wing, extended soon after 1894, has sashes with vertical glazing bars and horns.

Map evidence confirms the building occupies the site of an early nineteenth-century orangery serving Twickenham Park (renamed St Margaret's House around 1830), which was later rebuilt by Louis Vulliamy for the second Earl of Kilmorey. Estate plans from 1817 show the orangery in cruciform shape. An 1852 plan names it "Orangery" and identifies it as a subsidiary building to St Margaret's rather than a separate house. By the 1865 estate map it appears to have been separately fenced off. The 1894–96 Ordnance Survey map names it "The Orangery" but shows it as square on plan with a projecting porch, having lost its characteristic cruciform shape. By the 1935 Ordnance Survey map the building had acquired a western extension, stylistically likely to be late nineteenth-century.