A town-house transformation

The shell of an 1860s coach house has been internally reconfigured to dazzling effect with the help of the finest contemporary craftsmanship.

- Jeremy Musson

Monmouth House, Hyde Park Gate, London SW7 A home of Mr Hamish Ogston

IN about 1860, one William Heathcote, the owner of 29, Hyde Park Gate, decided to add a coach house with servants’ accommodation to his property. The addition made his house—one of a pair constructed in the 1840s with large gardens—more commodious. It went on to be the residence of a series of distinguished people, including Sir Henry and Lady Elizabeth Babington-Smith (daughter of the 9th Earl of Elgin, Viceroy of India in 1894–99). In 1927, it was bought by Sir Roderick Jones, head of the news agency Reuters. His wife, Lady Jones—the novelist and playwright Enid Bagnold—recalled in her Autobiography the delight she felt in finding ‘this untouched house with its big garden’, which she felt had the character of a country house swallowed up by expanding London.

The couple swiftly commissioned Edwin Lutyens to re-order the property and, in 1928, he effectively absorbed the former coach house into the domestic accommodation of No 29. A plan survives, which can be read with commentaries and asides in Bagnold’s memoir, to show how Lutyens created a vast new drawing room-cum-ballroom on its ground floor, with the former hayloft ‘which in our time was the biggest nursery in London’ on the second floor. This portion of their house now became the hub of their entertaining and family life. The drawing room was additionally the setting for after-dinner demonstration boxing matches.