For any London property-hunters with an interest in literary history, this apartment in Kensington will surely be worth investigating. One of the grand wedding-cake-style houses on Hyde Park Gate, a smart street that runs south from Hyde Park, it was the childhood home of sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Later life would see them hugely successful in their respective fields, and holding court at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group, whose influence on the arts in Britain was immense.
The house was bought by the sisters' father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a distinguished writer and critic, in 1876. He had been born just down the road at number 40, and the street was to bring him his second wife, Julia Duckworth, a widow who lived two doors down at number 22, and who would be the mother of Virginia, Vanessa, and their brothers Thoby and Adrian.
The house, which was too small for the Stephens' expanding family (there were up to 22 people living in the house at any one time, including servants), became a symbol to Virginia of the stuffy Victorian atmosphere of her upbringing. She described it in one memoir as a collection of ‘innumerable small oddly shaped rooms built to accommodate not one family but three.’
These days, Hyde Park Gate is no longer the cultural and literary hub it was in the Stephens' day, but it is rather grand, and is home to multiple foreign embassies. The house at number 22 has been split into apartments, and it is the ground floor apartment that is for sale now. The location could not be much nicer – Kensington Gardens is across the road and the Royal Albert Hall is a short step away, as are the shops of Kensington High Street, and venturing south will bring you to the museums of South Kensington.
The apartment itself has much to recommend it – an airy living room, modern kitchen, and particularly spectacular for central London, a private garden, with french doors leading into it from the bedrooms. And of course, there are those covetable blue plaques on the wall, memorialising the residence of Virginia, Vanessa, and their father. As the ground floor, this would presumably have been home to the original drawing room and dining room, as well as a small room in which Virginia and Vanessa spent much of their time painting and reading.
The flat is on sale with Savills for £2,450,000. See the full listing.
