Stepping back in time at Sambourne House

Stafford Terrace lies just north of Kensington High Street. The street is lined with Victorian terraces, their windows and doors dressed in white stucco. From the outside, there’s nothing special about No.18, but within you will find a treasure chest of high Victorian taste.

Stafford Terrace was built in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1875, No.18 was bought by the cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne – Linley to his friends. Linley had recently married a woman named Marion, whose parents lived nearby. He decided to turn their new home into a shrine to the Aesthetic Movement.

This movement was inspired by figures like John Ruskin, Walter Pater and William Morris. Followers believed that aesthetic pleasure should not be reserved for paintings and sculptures: domestic settings and everyday objects were no less an opportunity to create beauty. So, Linley spent the next 35 years turning his home into a work of art.

Step inside No.18 Stafford Terrace and you will be carried back a century and a half. Once your eyes adjust to the dim interiors, you realise that each room contains a profusion of decorative items. For instance, the papered walls are covered with framed photographs, prints, sketches and paintings. Meanwhile, every flat surface is filled with lamps and bronzes, or else vases, bowls and porcelain plates. Even the windows have been turned into art, pieced with intricate patterns, motifs and heralds of stained glass.

When Linley lived in the neighbourhood, Kensington was just becoming a fashionable address. Museums and concert venues had opened to the south of Kensington Gardens, while artists and sculptors were building studio villas around Holland Park. Linley was inspired by the homes of friends like Luke Fildes, Marcus Stone and Colin Hunter, his own house imitating these grander properties on a more modest budget. As a result, the rooms are crowded with rugs, furniture, and objets d’art.

Linley was a man with creative and social ambitions. He had expensive tastes and famous friends – including Oscar Wilde and Lewis Carroll. Although made the chief cartoonist at Punch – then a popular satirical magazine – he supplemented his income with illustrations for children’s books. However, his home was his most lasting creation, the extravagant interiors a way of claiming the artistic position to which he aspired.

Linley died in 1910 and his wife Marion four years later. The house was then occupied by their son, Roy, who vowed to ‘keep my beautiful home in its original state as long as I may live.’ Because Roy had no children, it was left to his sister Maud, and finally inherited by her daughter Anne, wife to the sixth Earl of Rosse.

One autumn evening in 1957, Anne invited thirty friends and acquaintances to the house – including the poet John Betjeman and the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. She proposed that they found a society encouraging the appreciation of Victorian art and architecture. In the years after the war, this period had fallen out of fashion, with several grand nineteenth-century buildings replaced by Modernist constructions. These included the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, the Coal Exchange in the City, and Euston Station with its famous arch. Victorian houses and tenements were also being pulled down – considered too dirty, too dingy, too difficult to heat.

The Victorian Society was created to campaign for the protection of these buildings. No.18 Stafford Terrace was their original headquarters, and after the death of Lord Rosse, the house became a museum run by the society. They hoped to show the public how much care and attention went into Victorian interiors, and how much splendour could be found in even a middle-class house.

Samborne House, as the museum is now known, is one of the most perfect examples of a late nineteenth-century family home. Its rooms have appeared on the screen numerous times, including the Merchant Ivory film of A Room with a View and the celebrated 1980s series of Brideshead Revisited. The museum is open from Wednesday to Sunday each week, offering a unique glimpse into the glories of the Aesthetic Movement and the beauty of Victorian domestic design.