Mansion House
Mansion House is a rare surviving Georgian town palace in London. With its magnificent interiors and elegant furniture, the Mansion House provides the Lord Mayor of the City of London with living, working and entertainment space.
Early in the preparatory work for the 1991-93 refurbishment of the Mansion House it was recognised by the Corporation of London that no work could be undertaken on a building of such importance without a thorough understanding of how it was conceived and constructed originally, and how it had changed over the years.
A large amount of preparatory work was undertaken prior to the restoration commencing and before the major consultants being appointed. Research on the architectural history of the house was identified as essential before any other work was contemplated, and was consequently commissioned by the corporation of London.
Samples were taken from the paintwork in various rooms. Sections prepared from these were used in conjunction with the documentary research to establish the sequence of paint colours and decorative schemes. All 123 paint colours had to be hand mixed on site equating to 800 to 1000 litres.
In many of the principal rooms, repainting had been very frequent, and thick layers of paint had built up which completely obscured the fine enrichment of the joinery and plasterwork. Paint stripping trials were conducted using various combinations of chemical, heat and manual stripping in order to establish methods which would be efficient whilst safeguarding the original wood or plaster surfaces.
In July 1991 developed design proposals were established which covered architectural decorations, carpets and floor coverings, curtains and soft furnishings, statuary and works of art, were presented to the committee as a design report. The approved allocation was £1.5M
The redecoration of the house was to be based on historic principles, and the way the house was used and to existing furniture. The proposals took as their point of departure the character of the house in regency times, because of the important suites of regency furniture, which survived.
The principal rooms were redecorated using flat oil paint in colours mixed from pigments available in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Knowledge of the colours used in the Mansion House, gained from documentary research and investigations of paint layers, informed the decisions made, although historic paint colours were not recreated. Nicholas Thompson drew up preliminary schemes but final decisions were taken jointly with Ian Bristow, City of London Architect on site.
Special paint effects were carried out by Tom Greening, the doors of the principal floor were grained to imitate mahogany in 1761 and this treatment was re introduced. A variety of figuring was used with the most elaborate reserved for the most important interiors such as the drawing room and the Venetian Parlour. The exterior doors were grained to represent dark polished oak. The Stone chimneypieces in the long parlour and the South Drawing Room were marbled to imitate those opposite them, as they had been when first installed.
The amount of Gilding however was limited by the budget, and the policy followed was to gild, if possible, on clean, stripped surfaces, and elsewhere only when necessary to build or modify existing schemes, in total around 40 % of gilding was renewed.
