Londonderry House

Holderness House, later Londonderry House, was designed by James "Athenian" Stuart for Robert Darcy, 4th Earl of Holderness in the period c. 1760–5, with ceilings based on Robert Wood's Ruins of Palmyra. The Earl is thought to have acquired the building next door as well, but at a later date. He subsequently joined the two so that the house became a double-fronted London mansion. During the First World War, the house was used as a military hospital. After the war, Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, a prominent Ulster Unionist politician, and his wife, Edith Chaplin, continued to use the house and entertained extensively.

The tragedy of the sale of Londonderry House was not the comparatively meagre price (by current standards) it fetched for the Londonderry family, but the fact that this magnificent mansion was then immediately, apart from its stableyard (which still stands, with its separate entrance in Brick Street still surmounted by the coronet of a Marquess), completely demolished. The bland exterior of Londonderry House concealed, for example, the aforementioned magnificently painted, and fresco-ceiling interiors by James "Athenian" Stewart who had, coincidentally, built the Temple of the Winds at the Londonderry's Ulster seat of Mount Stewart. The main stairway was meant to outdo that of Lancaster…