Situated on a fashionable, quiet London street, close to Kensington Palace, 29 Hyde Park Gate was originally one of a pair of houses built in the 1840s with large gardens, but it was further enhanced in about 1860 by its then owner, William Heathcote, with the addition of a coach house including servants’ accommodation.
The house was subsequently occupied by a series of illustrious owners, and in 1927 was bought by Sir Roderick Jones, head of the news agency Reuters. He and his wife, the novelist and playwright Enid Bagnold, commissioned Edward Lutyens at the height of his fame to restyle and re-order the property, combining the coach house and main house to create a stylish living space for entertaining. However, after World War II the property was divided again, with the main house eventually becoming home in 1974 to the Bulgarian ambassador, and the coach house – by then referred to as 29a – being converted into flats. Much of the 1920s interior that had been inspired and installed by Lutyens was sadly lost along the way.
The latest refurbishment took place between 2019 and 2021 for the current owner, businessman and philanthropist Hamish Ogston, who acquired the property in 2018. The works have seen the reinstatement of much of the splendour lost over the previous fifty years or so, following a remodelled floorplan and interior layout conceived by Mitchell Berry Architects.
Working closely with Joanna Wood, Atkey and Company produced the designs for a family of architectural joinery for the house, using the Lutyens phase of work as a guiding reference and creating a suite of joinery designs for the doors, pediments, architraves and skirtings throughout the house. These were then manufactured in our Somerset facility before being delivered to the client for installation. The resulting scheme, we believe, not only successfully reinstates the stylish grandeur of Lutyens’ vision, but provides echoes of the property’s longer history. The photo here shows the entrance hallway and the first floor landing.
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