Somerset House, Park Lane

Somerset House, Park Lane (built 1769–70; demolished 1915), was an 18th-century town house on the east side of Park Lane, where it meets Oxford Street, in the Mayfair area of London. It was also known as 40 Park Lane, although a renumbering means that the site is now called 140 Park Lane.

The freehold of the house was always with the Grosvenor family, while the successive owners of the lease were the 2nd Viscount Bateman, followed by Warren Hastings, a former Governor-General of India, the third Earl of Rosebery, the Dukes of Somerset, after whom the house took its longest-surviving name, and finally the publisher George Murray Smith and his widow.

The house was built between 1769 and 1770 for John Bateman, 2nd Viscount Bateman and was designed by the master carpenter John Phillips, who was the "undertaker" for the whole north-west corner of the Grosvenor estate.

The new house was built with one side facing Park Lane, the main entrance being from a courtyard which continued the line of Hereford Street. It had four storeys above ground, with bay windows extending through the floors. One bay faced Park Lane, and two more faced the garden, which ran down to North Row. Although all surviving pictures of the house show it cased in stucco, at the outset the façades may have been bare brick, with the windows dressed in Portland stone. On the ground floor, the entrance hall was paved in Portland stone and leading from it were the dining room, the drawing room and a dressing room. The staircase rose from the hall, with stone steps and iron railings, to the second floor, which had three principal rooms, including Lady Bateman's bedroom and her dressing-room. Of the chimneypieces in the main rooms, some cost £25 each, others £50.

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