Leighton House Museum

Leighton House at 12 Holland Park Road in London is the 19th-century home and studio of painter Frederic Leighton, featuring an Arab Hall lined with over 1,000 Middle Eastern tiles. Designed by architect George Aitchison in 1864, the townhouse was continuously expanded over three decades. Leighton became Baron Leighton on January 24, 1896, dying just one day later in the shortest peerage in British history.

London · from the walk “Kensington High Street: Shop, Eat & Explore” · audio ~4 min · Generated

12 Holland Park Road, London W14 8LZ

What 12th-century palace served as the model for the Arab Hall inside Leighton House in London?

Take a good look at the building in front of you... number twelve, Holland Park Road. Plain red brick. Restrained. Almost modest. You'd walk right past it without a second glance. But behind that unassuming facade hides what one Victorian visitor called... "quite the eighth wonder of the world."

...... This was the London home, studio, and thirty year long passion project of the Victorian painter Frederic Leighton. In the late nineteenth century, enormous wealth flowed to artists thanks to a booming middle class hungry for paintings. A community of high-profile painters grew up right here around the Holland Park estate... by the end of the eighteen hundreds, nine artists had commissioned purpose-built studio houses on this very street. Leighton was the grandest of them all.......... His architect friend George Aitchison designed the first part of the house in eighteen sixty-four, and it cost four thousand five hundred pounds. A reasonable sum. But then Leighton kept building... and building... for Three decades.......... The centrepiece? The Arab Hall. It was completed in eighteen eighty-two and cost More to build than the entire original house. Inside, more than one thousand tiles from Iznik, Damascus, and Persia line the walls, and the design was based on the twelfth century palace of La Zisa in Palermo, Sicily.......... But here's a detail most people miss. Leighton's obsession with collecting these tiles began over a casual conversation with the legendary explorer Richard Burton... in the spa town of Vichy in eighteen sixty-nine. Burton, then the British consul in Damascus, actually wrote to Leighton offering to "have a house pulled down" to get the tiles he wanted. Where tiles arrived damaged or incomplete, the ceramicist William De Morgan was brought in to make repairs and replacements so seamlessly you can barely tell the originals from the fakes.......... And the fountain in the center of the hall? It originally had goldfish swimming in it. Even the chandelier overhead was copied from a drawing Leighton made of a light fixture in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus.......... Now... the most poignant detail of all. Frederic Leighton was the First painter in history to receive a peerage. The patent creating him Baron Leighton was issued on the twenty-fourth of January, eighteen ninety-six. He died the very next day. His hereditary title was extinguished after existing for only One day... the shortest-lived peerage in British history.......... So what happened to this extraordinary house? After his death, the contents were sold off, including over a thousand of his own drawings. But in twenty twenty-six, Leighton House celebrates one hundred years as a public museum. Step inside if you can. From the street it's just another Kensington townhouse... but through that door lies a piece of Damascus, a piece of Sicily, and the dream of a man who spent a lifetime turning his home into a work of art.

Nearby stories