Speaking at a recent debate at London’s View Festival of Art History (Institut Français, London, 8 February 2014), Tate Britain’s Director, Penelope Curtis, professed that it had not been her intention to ‘transform’ the Millbank Gallery, newly renovated to the tune of £45 million. Instead, the aim was to recover its identity, both past and present, by excavating original design elements of the Grade II* former penitentiary in concert with new and sympathetic architectural features. Recapturing the essence of a historic building through architectural reframing finds another expression at Kenwood House which, three weeks following the unveiling of the ‘new’ Tate Britain (19 November 2013), reopened its doors after 18 months of its own restoration project, costing £5.95 million. Similarly, little at Kenwood has been ‘transformed’, but the essential repairs to the roof and façade which necessitated the building’s closure have enabled English Heritage to present afresh eight of the ground-floor interior spaces. Repainted, refurnished and with many of the paintings of the famous Iveagh Bequest rehung, the intention has been to reanimate Kenwood and conjure a sense of domesticity that would have attended the house in the time of its eighteenth-century owner, the Lord Chief Justice, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705–96).

The ‘Caring for Kenwood’ restoration project is the latest in a long line of architectural interventions at the north London villa, with several of its owners making various alterations over the past three-and-a-half centuries. After changing hands at least four times during the first half of the eighteenth century, the Kenwood estate was purchased by Lord Mansfield in 1754 as his and his wife’s country retreat. Within ten years, Mansfield had tasked the Scottish architect Robert Adam (1728–92) with extending and radically remodelling the existing red brick building in a neoclassical style, before turning to the interiors, to which he applied his trademark stucco and painted schemes throughout the late 1760s and 1770s. After Mansfield’s death in 1793, his nephew David Murray, 7th Viscount Stormont (1727–96), succeeded to the earldom and set about making further modifications to his newly-inherited house, only to die three years later. It was nevertheless time enough for Adam’s interior colour scheme to be painted over, while the architect George Saunders (1762–1839) was commissioned to enlarge the building with the creation of two new wings on the north front to flank Adam’s imposing portico. Recent paint analysis here has revealed that Saunders’ house-painters applied a shade of beige to the portico, mixing sand into the wet paint to make the brick and wooden walls and columns appear as sandstone. This granular effect has been spectacularly recreated at Kenwood, while changing the magnolia paint to beige now tonally unites the north front.

From here one enters the house, and it is inside that English Heritage have concentrated on recouping Kenwood’s identity before the second Earl’s modifications, thereby placing Robert Adam’s decorative scheme at its heart. Detailed paint analysis, together with Adam’s watercolour plans and a newly discovered inventory, has enabled Kenwood’s curators to reinstate the original palette of pale blues and lead whites to the walls and ceiling of the entrance hall, providing a better complement to Antonio Zucchi’s ceiling paintings of Bacchus and Ceres painted in 1773. The former turquoise walls and black balustrade of the Great Stairs have also been repainted in a more sympathetic range of ‘Adam’ blues, while the nearby antechamber is now restored to a delicate duo of light blue-green and white. 

Yet the crème de la crème of Kenwood’s recent colour revival is undoubtedly Lord Mansfield’s Library, or so-called ‘Great Room’, used by the first Earl to entertain guests and which remains one of the UK’s finest surviving examples of an Adam interior. From the 400 paint samples that were taken from its walls and ceiling, analysts have been able to determine the original scheme as a subtle combination of pale blues, greens and pinks that had been held within the framework of white plasterwork. The difficult decision of whether to return the original Adam palette to those features of the Great Room which, up until recently, had borne the prominent gilding that had been applied under the second Earl (and reapplied thereafter), was eventually taken – though not without its attendant controversy despite the reversibility of the renovation. Less controversial, perhaps, is the removal of much later additions, including the modern parquet floor and 1960s rust-red carpet to reveal the original double-sprung pine floorboards in excellent condition. No longer, too, are visitors funnelled down the centre of the room; the elimination of the rope barriers allows for both freer circulation and an enhanced sense of how this impressive space might have looked before the second Earl’s ‘Empire-style’ amendments. Titles of the books shelved at the room’s east and west ends can now be perused (albeit with many twentieth-century editions), while historic pieces of furniture, such as the restored crimson damask window seat, can be examined at close range.

In addition to paint-sample analysis, renovation has been guided by surviving documentation relating to Kenwood’s eighteenth-century contents. A recently-discovered bill of 1771 and an important inventory from 1796, both of which are held in the Mansfield family archive at Scone Palace in Perthshire, have proved particularly valuable in locating and replacing lost items which were integral to Adam’s interior scheme. The bill has, for instance, revealed the precise placement of two neoclassical statues of ‘Flora’ and a ‘Muse’ which once stood in the two niches of the antechamber, but had disappeared from the house at some point before World War I. Visitors to Kenwood can now see these niches re-adorned with casts from statues of the same life-size figures belonging to Syon House in west London, which also boasts significant Adam interiors. Besides such replicas, several items of furniture designed by Adam for Kenwood have been tracked down, bought back, and returned to their original places, including a pair of long white stools made in 1773 by Adam’s carver, Sefferin Nelson, to stand below the antechamber’s sculpture-clad niches.

Objects not original to the house, namely the outstanding paintings collection of the famous Iveagh Bequest, have been re-presented in the three south-front family rooms. The collection, comprising sixty-three Old Master and eighteenth-century British paintings of exceptionally high quality, as well as the house itself, were given to the nation in 1927 by the brewing magnate, Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (1847–1927), who purchased the estate two years earlier to save it from almost certain demolition. Forty-six unglazed paintings have been rehung in a broadly thematic arrangement across this ground-floor suite, with Lord Mansfield’s Dressing Room double-hung with British landscape and genre paintings, the Breakfast Room with eighteenth-century portraits and fancy pictures, and the narrower space of Lady Mansfield’s Dressing Room largely given over to seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings.

All three family rooms have also been fully refurnished to instil a sense of domesticity as befits their original purpose. New soft furnishings including silk damask and chintz curtains and three bespoke hand-knotted carpets from India create plush surroundings, while period furniture has been rearranged across the expanse of the floor in each room as if it were still in use by Kenwood’s eighteenth-century residents. As with elsewhere in the house, interpretation in these rooms has been radically overhauled with text now integrated into the historic displays themselves. Information is presented in stylistically sympathetic linen-bound handlists which can be picked up from off the surfaces of various pieces of furniture. The decision to eliminate panels and laminate sheets of text which often appear intrusive in country-house environments is an apt curatorial choice; the absence of wall labels significantly enhances the overall experience and visual effect of these rooms where paintings, decorative arts, architectural elements and furniture seamlessly interact. However, furniture historians may be less pleased with the decision to use some of the pieces, many of them antique and original to the house, as interpretation stands, which increases their risk to wear and tear while also reconfirming the value conventionally bestowed on Kenwood’s paintings over its other collection items. 

The selection of visitors’ seating is also somewhat dubious. Armchairs and sofas upholstered in black leather and resembling the furniture in a gentleman’s club appear bulky and stylistically anachronistic within the broadly eighteenth-century spatial configuration of the ground floor. Such masculine additions seem symptomatic of one of the restoration project’s guiding principles as extrapolated from Lord Iveagh’s Bequest Act of 1929, stipulating that Kenwood should be ‘preserved as a fine example of the artistic home of a gentleman of the eighteenth century’. Such an aim, based on the wont of a pre-war, male aristocrat and carried through to present-day display strategy, is questionable. In fact, eighteenth-century Kenwood was not primarily a gentleman’s residence at all; Adam’s radical modification in the 1760s and 1770s was actually undertaken to accommodate a largely female household, with the childless Lord and Lady Mansfield’s niece Anne (d. 1818) and two great-nieces Elizabeth (1760–1825) and ‘Dido’ Elizabeth Belle (1761–1804), the latter an illegitimate mixed-race daughter of one of the Lord’s nephews, occupying the house for many decades after 1766. Thankfully, the redisplay does not adhere slavishly to this aspect of the Iveagh Bequest, so redolent of patrician privilege, although its perpetual quotation in the property’s interpretation and other promotional content is unfortunate, particularly at a time when questions abound over whose Kenwood this is. Indeed, less than two weeks after the house reopened at the end of last November, the government announced plans to make English Heritage (which manages over 400 properties) an independent charity, investing £80 million in the organisation and intending to cut it free from public subsidy by 2023. Given the condition of the Iveagh Bequest that entry to Kenwood House be kept free, the property will now need to appear more accessible to its public than ever before.

Despite these few caveats, the ‘new’ Kenwood offers a remarkable spectacle and a glimpse – albeit one highly mediated – into the eighteenth-century elite visual culture of the English country house. Hot on the heels of last year’s hugely popular reunion of a large portion of Sir Robert Walpole’s paintings collection with its original apartments at Houghton Hall (see review of Houghton Revisited: Masterpieces from the Hermitage for BSECS by John Chu), the ‘Caring for Kenwood’ project contributes to a broader curatorial practice of historically-informed redisplay. The revival of Robert Adam’s decorative schemes, the reinstatement of original items of furniture, and the new research which has been imaginatively re-presented in house interpretation, lend scholarly integrity to the project’s more public-facing objective to make the house feel more like a home. With all this, Kenwood House may now be better positioned to confront its imminent departure from the mainland of government support.