Ashburnham House
Coordinates: 51°29′55″N 0°7′42″W / 51.49861°N 0.12833°W
Ashburnham House is an extended seventeenth-century house on Little Dean's Yard in Westminster, London, United Kingdom, which since 1882 has been part of Westminster School. It is occasionally open to the public, when its staircase and first floor drawing-rooms in particular can be seen to be superb. The masonry embrasures in the front room on the ground floor expose the house's mediaeval origins from before the sixteenth-century dissolution of the Monastery, and perhaps from before the Conquest.
There has been a building on the site since the eleventh century. The current house incorporates the remains of the mediaeval Prior's House, and its garden is the site of the monks' refectory and some of the earliest sittings of the House of Commons, such as when they met in the refectory to impeach Piers Gaveston in the time of Edward II.
Ashburnham House took its present form shortly after the Restoration when it was leased by Charles Ashburnham, a friend of Charles II. and subsequently became a London seat for his family that became the Earls of Ashburnham. As the staircase has the characteristics of work by Inigo Jones or his pupil John Webb the design of the house was for many years attributed to them, but now, however, the house as a whole is often attributed to architect William Samwell.
...
Wikipedia