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For the houses of the same name in Leicestershire and Brighton respectively, see The Tower House, Lubenham and Tower House, Brighton.

The Tower House
Location	Holland Park, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, West London, England
Built	1875–81
Architect	William Burges
Architectural style(s)	Gothic Revival
Governing body	Privately owned
Listed Building – Grade I
Official name	The Tower House
Designated	29 July 1949
Reference no.	1225632
Location in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London

The Tower House at 29 Melbury Road is a late Victorian townhouse in London's Holland Park district of Kensington and Chelsea built between 1875 and 1881 by the architect and designer William Burges as his personal residence. Designed in the French Gothic Revival style, it was designated a Grade I listed building in 1949. Burges described the house as a "model residence of the thirteenth century" and the architectural historian J. Mordaunt Crook considered it to be "the most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival and the last." More recently, James Stourton describes it as "the most singular of London houses, even including the Soane Museum." The house is built of red brick, with Bath stone dressings and green slates from Cumberland, and a distinctive cylindrical tower and conical roof. The ground floor contains a drawing room, a dining room and a library, while the first floor has two bedroom suites and an armoury. The exterior and the interior echo elements of Burges's earlier work, particularly the McConnochie House in Cardiff and Castell Coch and Cardiff Castle.

Burges bought the plot of land in 1875, and the house was largely complete by 1878, with construction undertaken by the Ashby Brothers and interior decoration by members of Burges's long-standing team of craftsmen including Thomas Nicholls and Henry Stacy Marks. Decoration of the house, together with the designing of innumerable items of furniture and metalwork, continued until Burges's early death in 1881. The house was inherited by his brother-in-law, Richard Popplewell Pullan, who had married Burges's sister, Mary. It was later sold to Colonel T. H. Minshall and subsequently, in 1933, to Colonel E.R.B. Graham. The poet John Betjeman inherited the remaining lease in 1962 but did not extend it. Following a period when the house stood empty and suffered significant vandalism, it was purchased and restored, firstly by Lady Jane Turnbull, and subsequently by the actor Richard Harris and then by the musician Jimmy Page.

The Tower House retains most of its internal structural decoration, but much of the furniture, fittings and contents that Burges designed have been dispersed. Many items, such as the Great Bookcase, the Zodiac settle, the Golden Bed and the Red Bed, are now in museums, for example The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, while others are held in private collections.

Location and setting

The Tower House is situated on a corner of Melbury Road, about 100 metres (330 ft) to the north of Kensington High Street and 0.3 miles (0.48 km) due northeast of Kensington (Olympia) station, in the affluent district of Holland Park. It lies opposite Stavordvale Lodge and next to Woodland House, built for the artist Luke Fildes. The development of Melbury Road in the grounds of Little Holland House created an art colony in Holland Park, the Holland Park Circle. Its most prominent member, the artist Frederic, Lord Leighton, lived at Leighton House, 12 Holland Park Road, and at the time of Leighton's death in 1896 no fewer than six Royal Academicians, as well as one associate member, were living in Holland Park Road and Melbury Road.

History

Design, construction and craftsmanship 1875-8

Although he continued to work on finalising several other projects, Burges received no further major commissions after 1875. The construction, decoration and furnishing of the Tower House occupied much of the last six years of his life, in which, as Crook wrote, he drew on his "experience of twenty years learning, travelling and building." After rejecting plots in Victoria Road, Kensington and Bayswater, Burges agreed to purchase the leasehold of the plot in Melbury Road from the Earl of Ilchester, the owner of the Holland Estate, in December 1875. The ground rent was £100 per annum. Initial drawings for the Tower House had been undertaken in July 1875, with the final form of the house decided upon by the end of the year. Building began in 1876, contracted to the Ashby Brothers of Kingsland Road at a cost of £6,000.

Burges used many artists and craftsmen in the interior decoration of the Tower House which remained unfinished at his death. An estimate book compiled by him is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum and contains the names of the individuals and firms who undertook work at the house. Many of the craftsmen who worked on the Tower House had previously worked with Burges on other projects. Thomas Nicholls undertook the stone carving for the house, including the capitals, corbels and the chimneypieces. The mosaic and marble work was contracted to Burke and Company of Regent Street, while the decorative tiles were supplied by WB Simpson and Sons Ltd of the Strand. John Ayres Hatfield crafted the bronze decorations on the doors, while the woodwork was the responsibility of John Walden of Covent Garden.

Henry Stacy Marks and Fred Weeks were employed to decorate the walls with murals, with Campbell and Smith of Southampton Row having responsibility for most of the painted decoration. Marks painted birds above the "Alphabet" frieze in the library, and the illustrations of famous lovers in the drawing-room were by Weeks. The pair also painted the figures on the bookcases. The stained glass was by Saunders and Company of Long Acre, with initial designs by Horatio Walter Lonsdale.

Burges and after: 1878-1962

Burges spent his first night at the Tower House on the 5 March 1878. The house provided a suitable backdrop for his gregarious nature. He entertained his wide circle of friends; to dinner with the wine served from decanters of "barbarous opulence" to his own designs, or to tea in the garden, with the tea poured from pots shaped like a pomegranate or a fish. His home was filled with his beloved dogs, amongst them Dandie, Bogie and Pinkie, some of which are immortalized in paintings on his pieces of furniture, including on the Dog Cabinet and at the foot of the Red Bed. The armoury at the Tower House enabled Burges to display his extensive collection of armour. Elsewhere he kept his large collections of architectural books and medieval manuscripts. The decoration of his bedroom also hints at another of Burges's passions, his addiction to opium. Stylised poppies covered the panels of a cupboard set next to his bed.

Burges died in this bedroom, just over three years after moving into the Tower House, on 20 April 1881. He was 53 years old. He caught a chill while overseeing work at Cardiff and returned to the Tower House, half paralysed, where he lay dying for some three weeks. Among his last visitors were Oscar Wilde and James Whistler. Burges was buried at the cemetery at West Norwood in the tomb he had designed for his mother.

The house was inherited by Burges's brother-in-law, Richard Popplewell Pullan, who had married Burges's sister, Mary. Pullan completed some of Burges's unfinished projects and wrote two studies of his work. The residence was then purchased by Colonel T. H. Minshall, father of Merlin Minshall and author of What to Do with Germany and Future Germany. Minshall sold his lease on the house to Colonel E.R.B. Graham in 1933.

Betjeman to Turnbull: 1962-70

The poet John Betjeman was a friend of the Grahams and was given the remaining two-year lease on the Tower House, together with some of the furniture, on Mrs Graham's death in 1962. Betjeman, a champion of Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, was an early admirer of Burges. In 1957, the Tower House had featured in the fifth episode of Betjeman's BBC television series, An Englishman's Castle, and in a radio talk on Cardiff Castle Betjeman spoke of the architect and his foremost work; "a great brain has made this place. I don't see how anyone can fail to be impressed by its weird beauty...awed into silence from the force of this Victorian dream of the Middle Ages."

Betjeman considered that the house would be too costly to run permanently, with potential liability for £10,000 of renovations upon the expiration of the lease. As a result, the Tower House was unoccupied between 1962 and 1966, during which time it was vandalised. According to Betjeman and Candida Lycett Green, the agents intentionally refused to let it and allowed the house to decline as they wanted to demolish the building and redevelop the site. A different view was taken by Handley-Read who wrote in his 1966 article on the house that "the Ilchester Estate, upon which the house is situated, are anxious that it should be preserved and (have) entered into a long lease conditional upon the house being put into a state of good repair." The purchaser of the lease, in 1965-6, was Lady Jane Turnbull, daughter of William Grey, 9th Earl of Stamford. Lady Turnbull undertook a program of restoration aided by grants of £4000 from the Historic Buildings Council and £3,000 from the Greater London Council. Lady Turnbull sold the lease in 1970.

Harris and Page: 1970 to the present

The actor Richard Harris bought the Tower House for £75,000 in 1970 after discovering that the American entertainer Liberace had made an offer to buy the house but had not put down a deposit. Reading of the intended sale in the Evening Standard, Harris bought the lease outright the following day, describing his purchase as the "biggest gift I've ever given myself". Harris employed the original decorators, Campbell Smith & Company Ltd., to carry out restoration work on the interior, using Burges's original drawings from the Victoria and Albert Museum, commenting that he "wanted Burges to be proud of us". In his autobiography, the British entertainer Danny La Rue recalled a visit to the Tower House with Liberace, writing that "It was a strange building and had eerie murals painted on the ceiling ... I was very uncomfortable and sensed evil". La Rue later met Harris who told him that he had bought children's toys for the "little bastards" (ghosts) inhabiting the Tower House, who then left Harris alone.

Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist, bought the house from Harris in 1972 for £350,000, outbidding the pop star David Bowie. Page, an enthusiast for Burges and for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, commented in an interview in 2012: "I was still finding things 20 years after being there – a little beetle on the wall or something like that, it's Burges's attention to detail that is so fascinating." In 2015 Page successfully challenged a planning application lodged by the pop star Robbie Williams. Williams, who had bought Woodland House, the neighbouring property to the Tower House, in 2013, wanted to undertake extensive renovations. Page argued that the alterations, particularly the intended underground excavations, would threaten the structure and fabric of the Tower House.

Architecture

Exterior and design

"The house was exactly as he had made and furnished it— massive, learned, glittering, amazing... It was strange and barbarously splendid; none more than he could be minutely intimate with the thought of old art or more saturated with a passion for colour, sheen and mystery. Here were silver and jade, onyx and malachite, bronze and ivory, jewelled casements, rock crystal orbs, marble inland with precious metal; lustre iridescence and colour everywhere; vermillion and black, gold and emerald; everywhere device and symbolism, and a fusion of Eastern feeling with his style."

In contrast to the typical style of houses on the Holland Estate, the cultural historian Caroline Dakers writes that the Tower House was to be a "pledge to the spirit of gothic in an area given over to Queen Anne". Burges despised the Queen Anne style, writing that it: "like other fashions ... will have its day, I do not call it Queen Anne art, for, unfortunately I see no art in it at all". Burges's inspiration was French Gothic domestic architecture of the thirteenth century and more recent models provided by the work of the nineteenth century French architect Viollet-le-Duc. Architectural historians Gavin Stamp and Colin Amery, in their book Victorian Buildings of London, 1837-1887, state that the Tower House "sums up Burges in miniature. Although clearly a redbrick suburban house, it is massive, picturesquely composed, with a prominent tourelle for the staircase which is surmounted by a conical roofed turret." Burges's neighbour Luke Fildes described the Tower House as a "model modern house of moderately large size in the 13th-century style built to show what may be done for 19th-century everyday wants".

The house has an L-shaped plan, and the exterior is plain, of red brick, with Bath stone dressings and green slates from Cumberland. The house is not large, its floor-plan being little more than 50 ft by 50 feet (15 m) square, (2500 square foot in total), but the approach Burges took to its construction was on a grand scale, the architect R. Norman Shaw remarking that the concrete foundations were suitable "for a fortress." This approach, combined with Burges's architectural skills and the minimum of exterior decoration, created a building that Crook describes as "simple and massive". As was usual with Burges, many elements of earlier designs were adapted and included. The street frontage comes from the other townhouse Burges designed, the McConnochie House in Cardiff, for Lord Bute's engineer. The cylindrical tower and conical roof derive from Castell Coch and the interiors are drawn from examples at Cardiff Castle.

At the Tower House the stair is consigned to the conical tower, avoiding the error Burges made at the McConnochie House when he placed the staircase in the middle of the hall. Beyond this, the house is almost a replica of the earlier Cardiff townhouse, except that the frontages have been reversed, with the arcaded, street front from the McConnochie House forming the garden front of the Tower House. Above a basement, the two storeys of the house are surmounted by a roof garret. The ground floor contains a drawing room, a dining room and a library, while the first floor has two bedrooms and an armoury. The Tower House was designated a Grade I listed building on 29 July 1949.

Interior

The architectural writer Bridget Cherry wrote that "the sturdy exterior gives little hint of the fantasy (Burges) created inside", interiors which the art historian Charles Handley-Read described as "at once opulent, aggressive, obsessional, enchanting, their grandeur border(ing) on grandiloquence." Each room has a complex iconographic scheme of decoration: in the hall it is Time; in the drawing room, Love; in Burges's bedroom, the Sea. Massive fireplaces with elaborate overmantels were carved and installed, described by Crook as "veritable altars of art ... some of the most amazing pieces of decoration Burges ever designed". Handley-Read considered that Burges's decorations were "unique, almost magical quite unlike anything designed by his contemporaries."

Ground floor

A bronze-covered door, with relief panels depicting figures, opens onto the entrance hall. In Burges's time the door had a letterbox, in the form of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, wearing a tunic powdered with letters. The letterbox is now lost, but a contemporary copy is in the collection of The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum. The interior centres on the double-height entrance hall, its painted ceiling depicting the astrological signs of the constellations, arranged in the positions they held when the house was first occupied. A mosaic floor in the entrance hall is designed as a labyrinth, the centre depicting the myth of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. The bronze-covered door to the garden entrance is decorated with a relief of the Madonna and child. As elsewhere, Burges incorporated earlier designs, the bronze doors echoing those at Cork Cathedral, and the maze floor recalling an earlier ceiling at Burges's office in 15 Buckingham Street. Emblems adorn the five doors on the ground floor of the Tower House, each one relevant to their respective room. A flower marks the door to the garden, with the front door marked by a key. The library is indicated by an open book, the drawing or music room by instruments, and the dining room by a bowl and flask of wine. The stained glass in the hall and at the head of the staircase is by Saunders and Co., to designs drawn by Lonsdale.

Library

The library features a sculptured mantlepiece resembling the Tower of Babel, with walls lined with bookcases. Figures within the chimneypiece represent "parts of speech, noun, verb, preposition." In the ceiling the founders of "systems of theology and law" are depicted. An illuminated alphabet frieze of architecture and the visual arts running around the bookcases completes the scheme, with the letters of the alphabet incorporated, including a dropped letter "H" falling below the cornice, the "most celebrated of all Burges's jokes". Artists and craftsmen are featured at work on each lettered door of the bookcases that surround the room. Both the Architecture Cabinet and the Great Bookcase stood in this room. Six glazed doors open from the library into the garden. Designed by Burges, one panel in the doors depicts him as Architect standing before a model of the Tower House.

Drawing room

On the wall opposite to the library fireplace, an opening leads into the drawing room. Three stained glass windows are set in ornamented marble linings, and opposite the windows, Burges placed the "Zodiac settle", originally designed for Buckingham Street. Love is the central decorative scheme to the room, with the ceiling painted with medieval cupids, and the walls covered with mythical lovers. Carved figures from the Roman de la Rose decorate the chimneypiece, which Crook considered "one of the most glorious that Burges and Nicholls ever produced." Echoing Crook, Charles Handley-Read, the first scholar of the twentieth century to give Burges serious consideration, wrote: "Working together, Burges and Nicholls had transposed a poem into sculpture with a delicacy that is very nearly musical. The Roman de la Rose has come to life."

Dining room

The dining room is devoted to Geoffrey Chaucer's The House of Fame and the art of story-telling, "tall stories (being) part of the dining room rite". Above the marble fireplace sits the Goddess of Fame. The tiles depict fairy stories, including Reynard the Fox, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood. The walls are covered with Devonshire marble, surmounted by glazed picture tiles, whilst the ceiling is reputedly of "sheet-metal." The room also shows Burges's innovative use of other materials; Handley-Read noted that the Victorians had "a horror of food smells" and therefore Burgess constructed the dining room of materials that did not absorb odours and could be washed. Burges designed most of the cutlery and plate used in this room, which display his skills as a designer of metalwork, including the claret jug and Cat Cup chosen by Lord and Lady Bute as mementos from Burges's collection after his death. The panels of the wine cupboard were decorated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

First floor

The windows of the stair turret approaching the first floor represent "the Storming of the Castle of Love". On the first floor are two main bedrooms and an armoury. Burges's bedroom overlooks the garden, with the theme of sea creatures. Its elaborate ceiling is segmented into panels by gilded and painted beams, studded with miniature convex mirrors set within gilt stars. Fish and eels swim in a deep frieze of waves painted under the ceiling, and fish are also carved in relief on the chimneypiece. On the fire-hood, a sculpted mermaid is gazing into a looking-glass, with seashells, coral, seaweed and a baby mermaid is also represented. Charles Handley-Read described the frieze below the Mermaid fireplace as "proto-art noveau" and noted "the debt of international art noveau to Victorian Gothic designers, Burges included." In this room, Burges placed two of his most personal pieces of furniture, the Red Bed (his own), and the Narcissus washstand, both of which originally came from Buckingham Street. The bed is painted blood red and features a panel depicting Sleeping Beauty. The washstand is red and gold, its tip-up basin of marble inlaid with fishes in silver and gold.

"The Earth and its productions" is the theme of the guest room facing the street. Its ceiling is adorned with butterflies and fleurs-de-lis, and at the crossing of the main beams is a convex mirror in a gilded surround. Along the length of the beams are paintings of frogs and mice. A frieze of flowers once in the room was painted over, and has since been restored. The Golden Bed and the Vita Nuova washstand designed by Burges for this room are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

"The most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival, and the last."

The final room on the first floor was designated an armoury by Burges, in which he displayed his large collection of armour. The collection was bequeathed to the British Museum upon his death. A carved chimneypiece in the armoury has three roundels carved with the goddesses Minerva, Venus and Juno in medieval attire.

The garret of the Tower House originally contained day and night nurseries, which Stourton considers a surpising choice of arrangement for the "childless bachelor Burges." They contain a pair of decorated chimneypieces featuring the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk and three monkeys at play.

Garden

The garden at the back of the Tower House featured raised flowerbeds which the cultural historian, Caroline Dakers, describes as being "planned according to those pleasances depicted in medieval romances; beds of scarlet tulips, bordered with stone fencing". Burges and friends would take tea in the garden, lounging on "marble seats or on Persian rugs and embroidered cushions round the pearl-inlaid table, brilliant with tea service composed of things precious, rare and quaint". A mosaic terrace is surrounded by marble seats with a marble statue of a boy holding a hawk at its centre, sculpted by Thomas Nicholls. The gardens of the Tower House and the adjacent Woodland House both contain trees from the former Little Holland House.

Furniture

In designing the medieval interior to the house, Burges illustrated his skill as a jeweller, metalworker and designer and produced some of his best furniture pieces including the Zodiac settle, the Dog Cabinet and the Great Bookcase, the last of which Charles Handley-Read described as "occupying a unique position in the history of Victorian painted furniture". The fittings were as elaborate as the furniture: the tap for one of the guest washstands was in the form of a bronze bull from whose throat water poured into a sink inlaid with silver fish. Within the Tower House Burges placed some of his finest metalwork; the artist Henry Stacy Marks wrote "he could design a chalice as well as a cathedral ... His decanters, cups, jugs, forks and spoons were designed with an equal ability to that with which he would design a castle."

Much of Burges's early furniture, such as the Narcissus washstand, was originally made for his office at Buckingham Street and was subsequently moved to the Tower House. Other examples include the Great Bookcase and the Zodiac settle. The Great Bookcase was also part of Burges's contribution to the Medieval Court at the 1862 International Exhibition. Later pieces, such as the Crocker Dressing Table and the Golden Bed and its accompanying Vita Nuova washstand, were specifically made for suites of rooms at the Tower House. John Betjeman located the Narcissus washstand in a second-hand shop in Lincoln and later gave it to Evelyn Waugh, a fellow enthusiast for Victorian art and architecture, who featured it in his 1957 novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Betjeman subsequently gave both the Zodiac settle and the Philosophy cabinet to Waugh, supposedly to placate Betjeman's wife Penelope, who failed to share their appreciation of Gothic Revival painted furniture.

Many of the decorative items designed by Burges for the Tower House were dispersed following his death. Several pieces from the collection of Charles Handley-Read, who was instrumental in reviving interest in Burges, were acquired by The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford. The Zodiac settle was acquired by the Higgins in 2011.

Dispersed furniture and locations

The table below lists the known pieces of furniture originally in situ in the Tower House, with their dates of construction and their current location where known.

Architectural coverage

The house was extensively described by Burges's brother-in-law, Richard Popplewell Pullan in the second of two works he wrote about Burges, The House of William Burges, A.R.A., published in 1886. The book contains a large number of photographs of the interior of the house by Francis Beford. As with Burges, the house was then largely ignored, James Stourton describing its early twentieth-century history as "a paradigm of the reputation of the Gothic Revival. A renewed understanding and appreciation of the house, and of Burges himself, began with Handley-Read's pioneering article in Peter Ferriday's collection Victorian Architecture, published in 1963. This was followed, in 1966, by a substantial article on the house, Aladdin's Palace in Kensington by Handley-Read for Country Life. Handley-Read's notes on Burges formed the basis of Mordaunt Crook's centenary volume, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, published in 1981, in which Crook wrote at length on both the Tower House and its contents. In 1984 the Tower House was the subject of a master's thesis by Helen Adkins at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau (unpublished). More recent coverage was given in London 3: North West, the revision to the Buildings of England guide to London written by Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, published in 1991. The house is also referenced in Matthew Williams's William Burges, published 2004 and in Great Houses of London by James Stourton and photographer Fritz von der Schulenburg published in 2012, which also includes some recent photographs. Some of Bedford's photographs of the Tower House from 1885 are included in Panoramas of Lost London, by Philip Davies, published in 2011.

Notes

1. ^ "The Tower House". English Heritage list. English Heritage. Retrieved 29 January 2013.
2. "The Tower House" (Map). Google Maps. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
3. Weinreb et al.
4. Dakers, p. 4.
5. Cherry & Pevsner 2002, p. 481.
6. ^ "Survey of London: volume 37: Northern Kensington". British History Online. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
7. Crook 1981, p. 58.
8. Dakers, p. 175.
9. ^ Dakers, p. 176.
10. Willsdon, p. 316.
11. ^ Crook 2013, p. 341.
12. Crook 2013, p. 315.
13. ^ Crook 2013, p. 309.
14. Crook 2013, p. 334.
15. Crook 2013, p. 78.
16. Crook 2013, p. 11.
17. HMSO 2011.
18. ^ Wilson, p. 208.
19. Betjeman 2010, p. 62.
20. Betjeman, John; Green, Candida Lycett (1995). Letters. Methuen. p. 289. ISBN 978-0-413-66940-7.
21. ^ Handley-Read 1966.
22. ^ Crook 2013, p. 396.
23. ^ Callan 1990, p. 138.
24. Dakers, p. 276.
25. Callan 2003, p. 200.
26. ^ La Rue, p. 137.
27. Callan 1990, p. 157.
28. "Rock legend's pilgrimage to castle". BBC News Online. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
29. Das, Jay (27 February 2015). "Listed building policies have ramifications for Jimmy Page and Robbie Williams". Cnplus.co.uk. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
30. Rubens 2014, p. 58.
31. ^ Dakers, p. 173.
32. Dakers, p. 1744.
33. Stamp & Amery 1980, p. 163.
34. ^ Crook 2013, p. 308.
35. Dakers, p. 174.
36. Cherry & Pevsner 2002, p. 511.
37. ^ Crook 2013, p. 326.
38. ^ Dakers, p. 177.
39. m "Letterbox". The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum. Retrieved 21 May 2013. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
40. Crook 2013, p. 311.
41. ^ Dakers, p. 178.
42. Crook 2013, pp. 327–328.
43. Crook 2013, p. 327.
44. Crook 2013, p. 324.
45. ^ Crook 2013, p. 323.
46. ^ Crook 2013, p. 312.
47. Crook 2013, p. 316.
48. Crook 2013, p. 338-40.
49. Crook 2013, p. 340.
50. ^ "Burges Washstand". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
51. ^ "The Golden Bed". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
52. "British Museum: William Burges". British Museum. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
53. ^ Stourton, p. 227.
54. Crook 2013, p. 314.
55. Handley-Read – Burlington.
56. Osband, p. 112.
57. Crook 2013, p. 319.
58. ^ "Case 4: (2010–2011) A Zodiac settle designed by William Burges" (PDF). Arts Council. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
59. Crook 2013, p. 328.
60. Crook 2013, p. 330.
61. Crook 1981, p. 77.
62. ^ "Zodiac Settle by William Burges". Art Fund. Retrieved 24 May 2013.
63. Accession number: 1971M134. "Oak & various marbles (top); pine painted & gilt (base)"
64. Crook 2013, p. 399.
65. "FrancisBedford (1815-94)—The House of William Burges, ARA". royalcollection.org.uk.
66. Ferriday.
67. Crook 2013, pp. 306–341.
68. "William Burges' Tower House. Ein Künstlerhaus des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts in London", Albert-Ludwigs-Universität zu Freiburg im Breisgau, 1984
69. Williams.
70. Stourton, pp. 220–228.
71. Davies.

References

• Betjeman, John (2010). Betjeman's England. John Murray. ISBN 978-1-84854-380-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Callan, Michael (1990). Richard Harris: A Sporting Life. Sidgwick & Jackson. ISBN 978-1-86105-766-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Callan, Michael (2003). Richard Harris: Sex, Death and the Movies. Trafalgar Square. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Crook, J. Mordaunt (1981). The Strange Genius of William Burges. The National Museum of Wales. ISBN 978-0-7200-0259-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Crook, J. Mordaunt (2013). William Burges and the High Victorian Dream. Francis Lincoln. ISBN 978-0-7112-3349-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Cherry, Bridget; Pevsner, Nikolaus (2002). The Buildings of England: London 3 North West. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-09652-1.
• Dakers, Caroline (1999). The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08164-0.
• Davies, Philip (2011). Panoramas of Lost London. English Heritage. ISBN 978-1-907176-72-2.
• Ferriday, Peter (1963). Victorian Architecture. Jonathan Cape. OCLC 270335.
• Handley-Read, Charles (November 1963). Notes on William Burges's Painted Furniture. The Burlington Magazine.
• Handley-Read, Charles (March 1966). Aladdin's Palace in Kensington: William Burges's Tower House. Country Life. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Rubens, Godfrey (16 May 2014). William Richard Lethaby: His Life and Work 1857–1931. Elsevier Science. ISBN 978-1-4831-4440-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• La Rue, Danny (1987). Drags to Riches: My Autobiography. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-009862-4.
• Osband, Linda (2003). Victorian Gothic House Style: An Architectural and Interior Design Source Book for Home Owners. David & Charles. ISBN 978-0-7153-1438-8. Retrieved 22 May 2012.

• Stamp, Gavin; Amery, Colin (1980). Victorian Buildings of London, 1837-1887: An Illustrated Guide. Architectural Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

• Stourton, James (2012). Great Houses of London. Francis Lincoln. ISBN 978-0-7112-3366-9.
• Her Majesty's Stationery Office (2011). Export of Objects of Cultural Interest 2010/11: 1 May 2010 – 30 April 2011. The Stationery Office. ISBN 978-0-10-851100-4.
• Weinreb, Ben; Hibbert, Christopher; Keay, Julia; Keay, John (2011). The London Encyclopaedia (3rd ed.). Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-73878-2.
• Williams, Matthew (2004). William Burges. Pitkin Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84165-139-2.
• Willsdon, Clare A.P. (2000). Mural Painting in Britain, 1840–1940: Image and Meaning. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-817515-5.
• Wilson, A.N. (2011). Betjeman. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4464-9305-2.

External links

• 1880s photographs of the exterior and interior of The Tower House from the Royal Institute of British Architects
• Elevation and sections of The Tower House from the Survey of London
• Photographs of The Tower House from the Survey of London
• A photo comparison of Tower House and the St. Anthony Hall chapter house of Trinity College, Connecticut
• The Arts & Crafts Home website – Colour photographs of The Tower House

• 1870s architecture
• Gothic Revival architecture in London
• Grade I listed buildings in London
• Grade I listed houses
• Houses completed in 1878
• Houses in Holland Park
• William Burges buildings