Eustace Balfour

Colonel Eustace James Anthony Balfour (8 June 1854 – 14 February 1911) was a London-based Scottish architect. The brother of one British Prime Minister and nephew of another, his career was built on family connections. His mother was the daughter of a Marquess, and his wife Frances, a noted suffragist, was the daughter of a Duke. Frances's sister in-law was Princess Louise, daughter of the reigning Queen Victoria.

Balfour's initial work was on English and Scottish country houses, but he won only one major commission in this field. However, his appointment as surveyor of the Grosvenor Estate in London gave him architectural control over much of Mayfair and Belgravia in the 1890s and 1900s, and the opportunity to design many buildings himself.

Balfour was a senior officer of the Volunteer Force in London. His outspokenness on military matters was a factor in his appointment as an aide-de-camp to King Edward VII.

A fastidious and somewhat withdrawn individual, Balfour succumbed to alcoholism in his fifties. This brought about his early death.

Balfour was born at Whittingehame House in East Lothian, the youngest of five sons son of James Maitland Balfour and his wife Lady Blanche Mary Harriet Gascoyne-Cecil, daughter of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 2nd Marquess of Salisbury. His paternal grandfather James Balfour was a nabob who had made the family's fortune as a contractor supplying the Royal Navy in India and became a Tory Member of Parliament (MP), while his mother's father was a Conservative cabinet minister in the 1850s. Her brother, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Lord Salisbury, was three times Prime Minister before being succeeded in 1902 by Eustace's elder brother Arthur Balfour.

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