Devonshire House in Piccadilly, was the London townhouse of the Dukes of Devonshire during the 18th and 19th centuries. Following a fire in 1733 it was rebuilt by William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Devonshire, in the Palladian style, to designs by William Kent. Completed circa 1740, it stood empty after the First World War and was demolished in 1924.
Many of Britain's great noblemen maintained large London houses that bore their names. As a ducal house (only in mainland Europe were such houses referred to as palaces), Devonshire House was one of the largest and grandest, ranking alongside Burlington House, Montague House, Lansdowne House, Londonderry House, Northumberland House, and Norfolk House. All of these have long been demolished, except Burlington and Lansdowne, both of which have been substantially altered.
Today the site is occupied by a namesake modern office building.
Site
Devonshire House occupied the site of Berkeley House, which was built between 1665 and 1673 and at a cost of over £30,000, by John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton, of Bruton Priory in Somerset, following his return from service as Viceroy of Ireland. The site is memorialised today by Berkeley Square, Berkeley Street, Stratton Street and Bruton Street. The house was later occupied by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, one of the celebrated mistresses of King Charles II.
Berkeley House, a classical mansion built by Hugh May, having been purchased in 1696 by William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire, was renamed "Devonshire House". As part of the agreement, John Berkeley, 3rd Baron Berkeley of Stratton (c. 1663–1697) undertook not to build on that part of the land he retained which lay directly behind the house to the north, so preserving the Duke's view. This covenant was still in force when the Berkeley land was developed after 1730, and the gardens of Berkeley Square represent the northern termination of that undeveloped strip, combined in the south with the gardens of Lansdowne House.'Berkeley Square, North Side,' in Survey of London: Volume 40, the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings), ed. F H W Sheppard (London: London County Council, 1980), 64-67, accessed 21 November 2015, online
On 16 October 1733, whilst undergoing refurbishment, the former Berkeley House was completely destroyed by fire, despite firefighting efforts by the Regiment of Guards, whose barracks were nearby, led by Willem van Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle, and by other local troops led by Frederick, Prince of Wales. The cause was attributed to careless labourers.London Online; Berkeley House and Devonshire House retrieved 30 September 2010; Sykes, Christopher Simon. Private Palaces: Life in the Great London Houses, p. 98, Chatto & Windus, 1985 Ironically, the Duke's former London residence, Old Devonshire House, at 48 Boswell Street, Bloomsbury, survived both its successors until The Blitz during World War II.
Ethos During the 18th century forms of entertainment began to change and large receptions came into fashion, often taking the form of concerts and balls. Initially, hosts hired one of the many new assembly rooms built to indulge the fashion. It was not long before the more dedicated and wealthy hosts began to add a ballroom to their town houses; the more wealthy still forsook their old-fashionedly proportioned town houses in favour of new and vast palaces designed purely for entertaining. The Duke of Devonshire, an owner of vast estates in Derbyshire and elsewhere, belonged to the latter category.Girouard, p194 explains this phenomenon. Thus the fire at Devonshire House in 1733 provided the unforeseen opportunity to build one such palace during the height of the fashion.
The 3rd Duke chose the fashionable architect William Kent, for whom this was a first commission for a London house. It was built between 1734 and about 1740.Howard Colvin A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, 3rd ed. 1995, s.v. "Kent, William". Kent was the protégé of the immensely cultivated 3rd Earl of Burlington and had worked on his Chiswick House, built in 1729, and also at Holkham Hall, completed circa 1741, both in the Palladian style and considered the epitome of fashion and sophistication. Chiswick House later came, with other estates, into the possession of the Dukes of Devonshire through the marriage of the 4th Duke to Lady Charlotte Boyle, daughter and heiress of Lord Burlington.Chatsworth, p52. "The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire". Derbyshire Countryside Ltd. 2005
Architecture
In typical Palladian style, Devonshire House consisted of a corps de logis flanked by service wings. The severity of the design - three storeys in eleven bays - caused one contemporary critic to liken the mansion to a warehouse,E. Beresford Chancellor, The Private Palaces of London. Chapter E: "It is spacious, and so are the East India Company's Warehouses." and a modern biographer of Kent to remark on its "plain severity".Michael I. Wilson, William Kent, Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardener, 1685—1748 1984:172, who adds "the fact that the house was hidden from public gaze behind a high wall must have helped still further to give it the appearance of a penitentiary" However, the curiously flat exterior concealed Kent's sumptuous interiors which housed a large part of the Devonshire art collection, considered one of the finest in the United Kingdom,Its nucleus, hung in the earlier house on the site, was noted by Pierre-Jacques Fougeroux, a copy of whose manuscript Voyage survives in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Francis Russell, "Early Italian Pictures and Some English Collectors", The Burlington Magazine 136 No. 1091 (February 1994;85-90) notes fashionable Tintorettos and Veroneses and Raphaels and some less-expected quattrocento paintings including a so-called Bellini. and a renowned library,B. Lambert, The History and Survey of London and its Environs, 1806:529. housed in a room 40 ft long and including amongst its treasures Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis, his record in sketches of a lifetime of painting. In the Duke's sitting room a glass case over the chimneypiece contained the best of his collection of engraved gems and Renaissance and Baroque medallions.Noted in a brief notice in The Crayon, 1.12 (21 March 1855:184). Such a prominent commission could hardly fail to be included in Vitruvius Britannicus.Vitruvius Britannicus volume iv (1767, pls. 19 and 20, illustration).
The plan of Devonshire House defines it as one of the earliest of the great 18th-century town houses, then designed identically to grand country houses. Its purpose, too, was identical, to display wealth and consequently power. Thus a great town house, by its large size and design, accentuated its owner's power by its contrast with the monotony of the smaller terraced houses surrounding it.Tait A. A. ‘Adam, Robert (1728–1792)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009 accessed 4 Oct 2010
At Devonshire House, Kent's exterior stairs led up to a piano nobile, where the entrance hall was the only room that rose through two storeys.The great height of the grander saloons pictured in The Illustrated London News was effected in the extensive restructuring under Decimus Burton by taking into the public spaces former upstairs accommodations, making of Devonshire House even more a site purely for public receptions and gallery display. Inconspicuous pairs of staircases are tucked into modest sites at either side, for the upstairs was strictly private.enfilades of interconnecting rooms, of which the largest space is devoted to the library, flank central halls, adjusting the traditions of the symmetrical Baroque state apartments, a design which did not lend itself to large gatherings. A few years later architects such as Matthew Brettingham pioneered a more compact design, with a suite of connecting reception rooms circling a central top-lit stair hall, which allowed guests to "circulate". Greeted at the head of the stairs, they then flowed in a convenient circuit, rather than retracing their steps. This design was first exemplified by the now-demolished Norfolk House completed in 1756.Girouard, pp 194 & 195. Therefore, it seems that Devonshire House was old-fashioned and unsuited to its intended use almost from the moment of its completion. Thus from the late 18th century its interiors were vastly altered.
Usage
Alterations were made to Devonshire House by the architect James Wyatt, over the long period 1776–90,Colvin 1995, s.v. "Wyatt, James". and later by Decimus Burton, who in 1843 constructed a new portico, entrance hall and grand staircase for the 6th Duke.Colvin 1995, s.v. "Burton, Decimus". At that time the external double staircase was swept away, allowing for formal entrance to be made into the ground floor through the new portico. Hitherto the ground floor had contained only secondary rooms and in 18th century fashion had been the domain of servants.
The new staircase conveyed guests directly to the piano nobile, from a low entrance hall, in a newly created recess formed by creating a convex bow at the centre of the rear garden facade.British History Online retrieved 5 October 2010. Known as the "Crystal Staircase", it had a glass handrail and newel posts.Maev Kennedy, "Chatsworth House Auction". Guardian Online, Wednesday 29 September 2010, retrieved 5 October 2010. Burton amalgamated several of the principal rooms; he created a vast heavily gilded ballroom from two former drawing rooms and often created double height rooms at the expense of the bedrooms above, causing the house to become even more of a place for display and entertaining rather than for living.
Devonshire House was the setting for the social and political life of the circle around William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire and his duchess, Lady Georgiana Spencer, Whig supporters of Charles James Fox.Hugh Stokes, The Devonshire House Circle, 1916. The house was also the site for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee with a fancy dress ball, known as the Devonshire House Ball of 1897. The guests, including Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and the Princess of Wales, were dressed as historical portraits come to life. The many portrait photographs taken at the ball have illustrated countless books on the social history of the late Victorian era.A light modern memoir of the ball, written by the daughter of the 11th duke and duchess, is Sophia Murphy, The Duchess of Devonshire's Ball, 1984. See also some images of guests in costume here: http://www.rvondeh.dircon.co.uk/incalmprose/index.html
Demolition
During World War I Devonshire House was used by the Red Cross, including for dealing with post. Gertrude Bacon was later in charge of this operation, and Rotha Lintorn-Orman served as its commandant, which put her in charge of training all ambulance drivers for the British Red Cross.
After the war, many aristocratic families gave up their London houses and Devonshire House was deserted in 1919.Noted by Fiske Kimball, in describing interiors from Lansdowne House re-erected in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Lansdowne House Redivivus". The Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 1943. The demolition was mentioned nostalgically several times in literature and caused Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway to think, as she passed down Piccadilly, of "Devonshire House without its gilt leopards", a reference to the house's gilded gates.Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, 1923. It also inspired Siegfried Sassoon's Monody on the Demolition of Devonshire House.Richard Davenport-Hines, "Cavendish, Victor Christian William, ninth Duke of Devonshire (1868–1938)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009 accessed 4 Oct 2010.