Clarendon House
Coordinates: 51°30′31″N 0°8′30″W / 51.50861°N 0.14167°W
Clarendon House was a town mansion which stood on Piccadilly in London, England, from the 1660s to the 1680s. It was built for the powerful politician Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, and was the grandest private London residence of its era.
After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, new houses began to spring up in the West End to accommodate Charles II's courtiers. Piccadilly was little more than a country lane, but the land to the north of it was just beginning to be used for housing; the next several decades would see the development the whole of this area, which was to become London's leading aristocratic residential district, Mayfair. Two other celebrated mansions were built close to Hyde's at around the same time. To the east Sir John Denham was building the house that later became Burlington House, and to the west Lord Berkeley was building Berkeley House, later Devonshire House.
Lord Clarendon acquired the 8-acre (3.2 ha) site for his house by royal grant in 1664. Ironically in view of later events he always maintained that he had been reluctant to build such an ostentatious house, but was unable to rent any suitable mansion. Clarendon House was built between that year and 1667 to designs by Roger Pratt. It was set well back from the street behind a courtyard. The central section had nine bays and the two side wings were each three bays wide. The house was built on the double pile plan, meaning that it was two rooms deep, and had two main storeys of roughly equal height. There was a raised basement below and a tall attic storey with dormer windows above. The roof was flat and balustraded and topped with a cupola. The style was typical of the English fashion of the day, clearly influenced by classical principles, symmetrical and pedimented, but lacking any classical orders. Little is known about the interior layout beyond what can be surmised from the exterior, from Pratt's other works, and from the conventions of the time. It probably had a large top lit central staircase hall and a series of state apartments. It had 101 hearths.
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