The earlier house

The estate that Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork (1694–1753), inherited at the age of ten had been bought by his great-grandfather, the 1st Earl, in 1682. It then centred on a Jacobean house probably dating from about 1610, and built around a courtyard. The 1st Earl had added an L-shaped stable block on the east side.

The only illustration of the early house as it looked before the 3rd Earl began his work is a bird’s-eye engraving of about 1698–9. It shows the house surrounded by formal gardens and separated from the river Thames – at a time when Chiswick was still a country village – by fields.

At this time the family only used Chiswick as an occasional residence. Their main home was a fine town mansion, Burlington House on Piccadilly.

The villa’s design

In 1725 a fire damaged the existing house at Chiswick, and this may have given Burlington a pretext for adding a new building to his house – the villa now known as Chiswick House. This villa was built between 1726 and 1729 and the exterior design was mostly the work of the earl himself.

The design was a synthesis of features drawn from a wide range of sources, including some of the drawings by Palladio and Inigo Jones that Burlington owned. One of his main aims seems to have been to evoke the architecture of ancient Rome as closely as possible. The resulting building pre-dated the widespread adoption of neoclassicism in British architecture by several years. Its ‘neo-Palladian’ style would soon spread across Europe and America.

The villa’s interiors were at least in part decorated by Burlington’s protégé and collaborator, the painter, architect and garden designer William Kent. In the past Kent was credited with designing most of the interior. However, it is now thought that his main contribution was the design of several items of furniture and the painting of ceilings, such as the Blue Velvet Room and Red Velvet Room. Who was responsible for the rest of the interiors remains a subject for debate.

The layout

Although Chiswick House is quite a small building, it has a complex and carefully considered design.

The main building is square, with an imposing six-column portico approached by an elaborately dividing external staircase. Crowning the composition is an octagonal dome which lights the central hall, or Saloon. On the opposite front, another external staircase connects the main rooms on the first floor with the gardens.

The rooms are of different shapes – octagonal, rectangular, circular – and arranged around the Saloon. This was an idea that came from Palladio’s drawings reconstructing the great Roman bath complexes, notably the Baths of Diocletian in Rome.

The decoration was inspired primarily by the work of Inigo Jones – the gallery ceiling, for instance, evokes the Whitehall Banqueting House in miniature.

The Dukes of Devonshire

Lord Burlington had two daughters but no sons, and after his death in 1753 Chiswick passed to his son-in-law the Marquess of Hartington, later 4th Duke of Devonshire. This is why most of the historic contents were ultimately moved to the Devonshires’ family seat, Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, where they remain.

In 1788 the 5th Duke decided to demolish the early 17th-century house. The duchess, the celebrated Georgiana, was famously active in political circles associated with Charles James Fox and the Whig ‘opposition’. To make Chiswick House a suitable base for lavish entertaining, it needed remodelling. The duke commissioned John White, a little-known builder and architect, to add two three-storey wings to the east and west sides of the villa to create replacement accommodation. These wings completely obscured the villa’s original design and character, but converted it into a practical, compact country house.