page_title: William Burges
section_title: The Tower House
hierarchical_section_title: William Burges / Later works / The Tower House
caption_attribution_description: English: Tower House, Kensington
context_page_description: William Burges ARA was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoclassical architectural style and re-establish the architectural and social values of a utopian medieval England. Burges stands within the tradition of the Gothic Revival, his works echoing those of the Pre-Raphaelites and heralding those of the Arts and Crafts movement.
  Burges's career was short but illustrious; he won his first major commission for Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork in 1863, when he was 35, and he died, in 1881, at his Kensington home, The Tower House, aged only 53. His architectural output was small but varied. Working with a long-standing team of craftsmen, he built churches, a cathedral, a warehouse, a university, a school, houses and castles.
  Burges's most notable works are Cardiff Castle, constructed between 1866 and 1928, and Castell Coch, both of which were built for John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute.
context_section_description: From 1875, although he continued to work on the completion of projects already begun, Burges received no further major commissions. The construction, decoration and furnishing of his own home, The Tower House, Melbury Road, Kensington, occupied much of the last six years of his life. Burges designed the house in the style of a substantial thirteenth-century French townhouse. 
  Of red brick, and in an L plan, the exterior is plain. The house is not large, its floor-plan being little more than 50 feet square. But the approach Burges took to its construction was on a grand scale: the floor depths were sufficient to support rooms four or five times their size and the architect Richard Norman Shaw wrote of the concrete foundations as being 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 from the McConnochie House, the cylindrical tower and conical roof from Castell Coch and the interiors from Cardiff Castle.
  The interior centres on the double-height entrance hall, Burges having avoided the error that he had made at the McConnochie House when he placed a vast central staircase in the middle of the building. At The Tower House, the stair is consigned to the conical tower. The ground floor contains a drawing room, dining room and library, while the first floor holds bedroom suites and a study. If Burges shunned exterior decoration at The Tower House, he more than compensated internally. Each room has a complex iconographic scheme of decoration: that of the hall is Time, in the drawing room, Love, in Burges's bedroom, the Sea. Massive fireplaces with elaborate overmantels were carved and installed, a castle in the Library and mermaids and sea-monsters of the deep in his own bedroom. His brother-in-law, Pullan, wrote that "Chaucer and Tennyson's poems were Mr Burges' chief text-books when engaged in designing these decorations."
  In designing the medieval interior to the house, Burges also illustrated his skill as a jeweller, metalworker and designer, and produced some of his best works of furniture 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."
  Upon completion, the Tower House was sensationally received. In a survey of the architecture of the past fifty years, published by The Builder in 1893, it was the only private town house to be included. In 1966, when the house was empty, Handley-Read described it as "unique in London, a precious anthology of designs by one of the most imaginative of all Victorian architects."  Crook considers the house, the "synthesis of [Burges's] career and a glittering tribute to his achievement." The Tower House, which remains a private home, owned by Jimmy Page for many years, retains much of its internal structural decoration, but the furniture and contents that Burges designed for his home have been dispersed.
caption: The Tower House: Burges's Palace of the Arts
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