CHISWICK HOUSE - LONDON

•Chiswick House is a Palladian villa in Burlington Lane, Chiswick.

•This is finest remaining example of Neo-Palladian architecture in London.

•The house was designed by Lord Burlington, and completed in 1729.

•The house and gardens, which occupy 26.33 hectares (65.1 acres), mainly created
by architect and landscape designer William Kent, is one of the earliest examples of
the English landscape garden.
•During the 19th century the house fell into decline, and was rented out by the
Cavendish family.

•It was used as a hospital from 1892. In 1929, the 9th Duke of Devonshire sold
Chiswick House to Middlesex County Council, and it became a fire station.

•The villa suffered damage during World War II, and in 1944 a V-2 rocket
damaged one of the two wings.

•The wings were demolished in 1956. Today the house is a Grade I listed
building, and is maintained by English Heritage.
•The original Chiswick House was a Jacobean house owned by Sir Edward
Wardour, and possibly built by his father.

•It is dated c.1610 in a late 17th century engraving of the Chiswick House estate
by Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, and was constructed with four sides around an
open courtyard.

•Wardour sold the house to Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset in 1624.

•The house was quite large: documents it is recorded as having 33 fireplaces.

•Lord Burlington (1694-1753), the other central figure in the Palladian movement,
had a more intellectual approach to Palladian principles.

•Not only a distinguished amateur architect and important patron, he became the
acknowledged arbiter of taste in Palladian England.

•At Chiswick he added to his Jacobean mansion (destroyed) a smaller version of

the Rotonda, Chiswick House, which also takes ideas from Scamozzi's Rocca
Pisani .

•The plan has two suites of apartments around an octagonal domed saloon.

•The sequence of variously shaped rooms, round, octagonal and apsidal-ended,

reappears at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, and influenced Robert Adam.

•On the exterior, openings punctuate the neutral wall surface.

•The recessed Venetian windows of the rear fa•

ade were to have a long history in
Palladian building."
•The gardens at Chiswick were an attempt to symbolically recreate a garden of
ancient Rome which were believed to have followed the form of the gardens of
Greece.

•The gardens, like the villa, were inspired by the architecture of ancient Rome
combined with the influence of contemporary poetry and theatre design.

•Lord Burlington's gardens were inspired by such gardens as those of the

Emperor Hadrian's Villa Adriana at Tivoli, from which the three statues at the
end of the exedra (according to Daniel Defoe) were alleged to have come.

•The gardens at Chiswick were originally of a standard Jacobean design, but

from the 1720s they were in a constant state of transition.

•Burlington and Kent experimented with new designs, incorporating such

diverse elements as mock fortifications, classical fabriques, statues, groves, faux
Egyptian objects, bowling greens, winding walks, cascades and water features.
•By 1725 William Kent had begun to extend his art from ceiling and wall paintings
to the design of their settings.

•Kent was the first British designer to tackle an interior as a whole.

•Picture frames, door surrounds, fireplaces and furnishings started appearing in

his design drawings.