Marble Hill House: The Free Palladian Villa Built by a King's Mistress

From the Thames path it looks like somebody has cut a small Italian villa out of white card and propped it at the top of a lawn. No wings, no clutter, no sprawl: a perfect white block of a house sitting in sixty-six acres of grass with boats moored in front of it. Somebody in 1760 described it as white as snow, a small building without wings, and nobody has improved on that.

Marble Hill House was built by a woman who had been married at seventeen to a violent gambler, who went on to become a king's mistress and her rival's friend at the same time. She used the settlement she extracted from the arrangement to buy a piece of land and a house in her own name. It is now free to go into. This is why you should.

Henrietta Howard Built This With Her Own Money

Henrietta Hobart was Norfolk gentry and an orphan by twelve: her father was killed in a duel and her mother died four years later. At seventeen she married Charles Howard, who turned out to be a physically violent compulsive gambler. In 1714 the couple went to Hanover, essentially on spec, to attach themselves to the family about to inherit the British throne, and it worked.

By 1723 she was the acknowledged mistress of the future George II. Here is the part that makes her interesting: she was simultaneously a Lady of the Bedchamber to Princess, later Queen, Caroline. She served her lover's wife. Caroline actually liked her, and was glad her husband's mistress was somebody congenial, though she administered the occasional public snub to keep things clear.

In 1723 the Prince of Wales settled eleven and a half thousand pounds on her, held in trust, including eight thousand pounds of South Sea Company stock. English Heritage now states openly what that means: South Sea Company dividends included profits from the slave trade. That money bought the land at Twickenham and built the house, and it was done as property in her own name, which for a married woman in the 1720s was the entire point. It was independence from a husband she could not divorce.

She went deaf young and it worsened through her life. She separated from Charles around 1727, became Countess of Suffolk when he inherited the earldom in 1731, and left court in 1733. In 1735 she married the Hon. George Berkeley, by every account happily, and after he died in 1746 she retreated here permanently until she died in 1767.

Her Twickenham circle was Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Gay, and later her young neighbour Horace Walpole from Strawberry Hill up the road. It was said to rival the royal court for conversation, which was rather the idea.

A Villa the Size of a Doll's House

It was built between 1724 and 1729, and who designed it is genuinely disputed. Colen Campbell published the design. Horace Walpole and Swift both credited Henry Herbert, later the 9th Earl of Pembroke and known as the Architect Earl. Roger Morris built it and was also paid two hundred pounds for garden structures including an ice house and a greenhouse. English Heritage's own history says the designer remains uncertain, which is refreshing.

What is not disputed is the source. It leans heavily on Palladio's Villa Cornaro of 1553, filtered through Campbell. And its influence ran a very long way: this compact villa plan became a standard model for the Georgian English villa and, through pattern books, for plantation houses in the American colonies. Drayton Hall and Monticello are both cited. A small white house in Twickenham, built by a king's mistress, is somewhere in the ancestry of the American classical style.

The Great Room Is a Perfect Cube

Go up to the first floor. The Great Room is a cube of exactly twenty-four feet in every direction, full height, gilded, and hung with five capriccio paintings of Roman ruins by Giovanni Paolo Panini. Those paintings were dispersed and then reunited with the room in the 1980s, which rarely happens.

The chimneypiece is white and gold and carved with a pair of reclining figures over the pediment. The recent restoration repainted the ceiling a pale stone colour and the doors plain brown, based on paint analysis rather than taste. It made the room quieter and considerably more convincing than the version visitors saw twenty years ago.

Elsewhere: a Chinese lacquer screen of about 1735 bearing Henrietta's own coat of arms, a marble pier table with peacocks possibly designed by William Kent. Embroidered mahogany settees worked by the needlewoman Anne Northey, and portraits by Charles Jervas and Thomas Hudson. Most of the original contents left the house before 1902, so what is here has been assembled and hunted down, but it is assembled with unusual care.

Chinese Wallpaper and a Mahogany Staircase

The dining parlour is the surprise. It was created in the 1750s by the architect Matthew Brettingham and hung with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper: flowering branches, birds, butterflies, a pheasant in scarlet and turquoise, all on a pale ground. The record survives of the work: in 1755 workmen spent forty-seven days hanging sixty-two sheets of it. Forty-seven days.

The table is laid, with a pyramid of fruit in the middle and glass everywhere, so you get the effect the paper was meant to have on a lit table under candles. Look at the gilt side table beneath the wallpaper too, with its famille-rose jars underneath.

The other thing to stop for is the staircase. It is mahogany, which in the 1720s was newly fashionable and extravagantly expensive, and the listing singles it out. Stand at the top and look down: dark twisted balusters cutting diagonally across a black and white chequered stone floor, with a lantern hanging in the well. It is the best photograph in the house.

One of the bedchambers is hung in deep green damask with a pair of tall Ionic columns framing the bed alcove, another in crimson with candles lit against it. The bedchambers are hung with recreated damasks and flock papers taken from period patterns.

The Park, the Grotto and the Ferry

Sixty-six acres of riverside parkland, free, open all the time. Alexander Pope, who lived up the road, and the royal gardener Charles Bridgeman both advised on the landscape, and the recent restoration was guided by a detailed estate plan of about 1749.

The grotto is the thing to find. Henrietta designed it herself with her great-niece, decorated with shells and coral brought along Caribbean trade routes, polished glassmaking waste for sparkle, and a floor of blue-grey flints and water-worn pebbles edged with cattle bones. It was buried under nineteenth-century landscaping, dug out in 1941, dug out again in the 1980s, and restored properly in the recent work.

Also here: the Sweet Walk, the scented path between White Lodge and the house, recreated; a restored underground ice house; a hedged ninepin bowling alley where you can now actually play skittles. A hornbeam arcade, and Henrietta's black poplar avenue, replanted, with more than three hundred and forty new trees across the estate.

And the ferry. Hammerton's Ferry runs across the Thames from the Marble Hill bank to Ham House, one of only four London ferry crossings never replaced by a bridge or a tunnel. Walter Hammerton started it in 1909 with a twelve-passenger skiff, was sued by rival operators, and won in the House of Lords in July 1915.

It runs weekends year-round and weekdays from February to October, weather permitting. Doing Marble Hill and Ham House in one day with a boat in the middle is one of the best afternoons in London.

Marble Hill House Is Free, and It Nearly Was Not There At All

In 1898, the Cunard family bought the estate intending to build housing on it. The campaign to stop them produced the Richmond, Ham and Petersham Open Spaces Act of 1902, passed specifically to protect the view from Richmond Hill. It remains the only view in England protected by an Act of Parliament. The London County Council opened the park in 1903, making this the first eighteenth-century house in England preserved by a public body.

Between about 2018 and 2022, the Marble Hill Revived project put roughly eight million pounds into it, around five million of that from National Lottery funding, with more than two hundred and forty volunteers involved. The house got structural and roof repairs, window and blind restoration, repainting in historically accurate off-white, paint analysis, conservation of the collection, and a lift for step-free access to the first floor.

The park got the grotto, the Sweet Walk, the ice house, the bowling alley, the pleasure garden and paths. A refurbished Coach House Café in the stable block, a children's play area with trampolines and a willow tunnel, and improved sports pitches and courts.

The lost Georgian garden was reconstructed using geophysical survey, LiDAR mapping and archaeology, which is a sentence I enjoy writing about a Twickenham park. The house reopened on 21 May 2022.

Visiting Marble Hill House: Practical Notes

📍 Address: Richmond Road, Twickenham TW1 2NL.

🎫 Cost: the house is free to enter, but you need a free ticket. Booking online is not compulsory but does guarantee entry. The park is free and open every day all year.

⏰ Opening: the house opens Wednesday to Sunday and bank holidays, ten until five. English Heritage's own pages have described the free house opening as an April to October season, so if you are planning a winter visit specifically for the interiors, check before you travel. The park does not close.

🚇 Getting there: St Margarets is the closest station at about ten minutes' walk, with Twickenham also nearby. From Richmond you can take the District line or Overground and walk along the river, which is the nicest approach. Parking on site is limited, so check before driving.

☕ Food: the Coach House Café in the stable block is open whenever the park is, all year, roughly from eight in the morning to mid or late afternoon, and uses produce from the kitchen garden.

Also on site: a second-hand bookshop on the first and third Sundays of the month, free community walks on Tuesday mornings, bookable sports pitches, and a good children's play area. Dogs are welcome on leads.

⏳ How long to allow: an hour for the house, an hour for the park, three or four hours if you take the ferry to Ham House as well.

🗺️ Nearby: Ham House is directly across the water and is the grander seventeenth-century counterpart, spectacular in spring when the crocuses are out. Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole's Gothic fantasy, is a natural pairing given that he was Henrietta's friend and neighbour. Orleans House Gallery, York House Gardens and Eel Pie Island are all within a walk, and Richmond itself is up the towpath, with Isabella Plantation in the park above it. For another architect's own house, Pitzhanger Manor is Sir John Soane's.

Marble Hill House is a perfect small building, full of things worth looking at, standing free of charge in sixty-six acres beside the Thames. And on a weekday in term time you may well have the Great Room to yourself. There is no good reason not to go.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.