Secret splendour

No 15, Kensington Palace Gardens, London W8 | After a period of institutional use and abandonment, a house created for a merchant and philanthropist in the 1850s has been turned back into a family home. Clive Aslet reports

- Clive Aslet

A GENERATION ago, it was said that London had few great private houses in comparison to Paris because so many, such as Devonshire House, had been demolished between the wars or consigned to institutional use. But, in recent years, a growing number of large mansions around the capital have been turned back into family homes. A splendid example is No 15, Kensington Palace Gardens, which had been used as a diplomatic residence from 1949 and was then left empty. In 2006, it was purchased by the current owners. Now, it has not only been sumptuously revived inside and out, but equipped with all the rooms that are today expected of a house of this standing— many of which would have been unimaginable to its Victorian owner, the lace-manufacturer and philanthropist George Moore.

Kensington Palace Gardens was developed on the site of the old kitchen garden at Kensington Palace, closed after the Prince Consort consolidated the royal kitchen gardens at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park. ‘From its great breadth, imposing aspect, and the correct taste displayed throughout,’ the broad avenue designed by James Pennethorne was set ‘to become a most aristocratic neighbourhood’— in the eyes of the Illustrated London News of 1846. The road was soon known as Millionaires’ Row, a more accurate description, as the new residents would be railway contractors, industrialists, builders and businessmen like Moore: merchant princes rather than actual peers.