Robert Adam’s Country Houses - Kenwood, Osterley, Syon

Robert Adam started his career with two advantages unusual among professional architects of his time. He had considerable personal wealth, inherited from his father, who had not only been Scotland’s leading architect but also an entrepreneur in the construction and allied industries, and he had a university education.

He was able to undertake a three-year Grand Tour in some luxury, to hire drawing teachers and antiquarians and, equally important, to consort with British and Italian aristocrats in Rome and elsewhere on terms of near equality. He was also fiercely ambitious.

In 1758 he settled in London and set about cultivating patrons. In this he was very successful, and the majority of his English country houses date from the 1760s. His architectural skills had a lot to do with it, of course, and he was indeed a designer of genius and originality; 250 years later many people who could not name another eighteenth-century architect can recognise the Adam style.

Adam started work on Osterley, Syon and Kenwood in 1761, 1762 and 1767 respectively. A feature of the age was that wealth was not so immense and liquid as in other periods, and many of Adam’s works therefore are adaptations of existing houses, and were added to piecemeal over several years. This is worth mentioning not only because it explains much about his creations but also to plead that this day is not as completely mad as it might at first seem to be. Visiting these three houses on a single day is entirely feasible and rational if the focus is solely on Adam’s contributions, and other aspects and contents are ignored.

The result is the richest imaginable immersion in eighteenth-century architecture and design of the highest quality.