Double Villa

Double Villa, 25 and 25a Mansionhouse Road, 1856, Alexander Thomson

Built for Henry Watson, clothier.

The double villa appears to be a single Picturesque Grecian villa, but is in fact two houses of identical plan, with one rotated through 180 degrees, creating two pairs of identical asymmetrical elevations.

The villa is characteristic of Thomson; squared rubble, ashlar dressings and incised Greek and Egyptian detail under shallow-pitch broad-eaved slate roof.

Responding to the change in relative importance of the dining room, now as much used as the drawing room for business entertaining, Thomson designed a new type of continuous glass window behind a freestanding stone colonade at the dining room. This was his first experiment in what could be called an inside-out curtain wall.

His interior decoration for these rooms, with elaborate cornices and pine-panelled walls, included a `sun’ ceiling in the dining room and a `moon’ ceiling at the first-floor drawing room.

Decoration was restored at no 25a in 1995 by Alexander Page and Mark Baines.