The Room That Cost More Than the House

From the street, 12 Holland Park Road gives nothing away. Red brick, a plain Victorian facade, the sort of house you could walk past a hundred times. Step inside and the house performs its trick: past the studio and the staircase, the corridor opens onto a gilded dome, a splashing fountain, and walls tiled floor to ceiling in peacock blue. This is the Arab Hall — the most transporting room in Victorian London.

The house belonged to Frederic Leighton, the most celebrated British artist of his day: President of the Royal Academy, and in 1896 the only British painter ever raised to the peerage, as Lord Leighton. He bought the land in 1864 and had the house built to his own unusual brief — a working studio-house — with his friend George Aitchison, an architect who had never designed a house before. The original house went up in the mid-1860s for £4,500. The Arab Hall, added a decade later, cost more than £7,000. Leighton spent more on one room than on the entire house around it.

The room began with travel. Leighton toured Turkey in 1867, Egypt in 1868, and Syria in 1873, and in Damascus he started buying the tiles that would line these walls — mostly late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, a collection the Royal Borough calls as important as any held in Britain. More arrived through friends, including the explorer Richard Burton, who shopped for tiles on Leighton's behalf between 1869 and 1873.

Construction started in 1877 and took four years. Leighton and Aitchison took their model from the twelfth-century Sicilio-Norman palace of La Zisa in Palermo — not a copy but an evocation, filtered through Victorian confidence. Then they summoned the best hands in London: the potter William De Morgan, the illustrator Walter Crane, the sculptor Edgar Boehm, the artist Randolph Caldecott. Crane's design for the gold mosaic frieze was made up in Venice and shipped to Holland Park in sections; the dome was gilded; a fountain was set under it to cool the air.

Stand in it today and the details keep arriving: the mashrabiyya wooden screens, the marble mosaic floor, the Arabic calligraphy woven into Crane's frieze. It was designed to overwhelm — a room built to impress the artistic and social elite of London, and proof, if any were needed, that Leighton moved in a world where a Kensington villa could contain a Damascus courtyard.

Leighton died in January 1896, months after his final addition to the house, the Silk Room gallery, was finished. The house is now the Leighton House Museum, and the Arab Hall remains its centerpiece — still one of the most photographed Victorian interiors in Britain, still stopping visitors mid-step the way it stopped Leighton's guests a hundred and forty years ago.

If there is a single room that argues the Victorians never did anything by halves, it is this one: a painter who saw Damascus, came home to west London, and rebuilt it in brick and tile at a cost greater than his house. The empire brought the world to London; Leighton tiled his hallway with it.