Chelsea Manor House

This is about the very few C17th private houses left in London; it stands in its own extensive grounds in Chelsea, and was built when the King’s Road was still the royal route to Hampton Court. The house was near-derelict when I became involved in the project, but the superb paneling and architectural features existed; these gave me the spur to its interior decoration, which, as the brief stated, was not to be too rigidly ‘period’, but to combine the past with dashing originality and verve. One especially exciting moment was discovering a painting of the huge drawing room as it was when added in the early 1800s, which was uncannily like the scheme I had already envisaged.