"It needs a bit of imagination, but could be made into a really stunning home". In the bedroom, too, they have copied the old, though not the original, pine wardrobe doors, for the doors to more wardrobes and a dressing table.The house is cosy and inviting, with a particularly large drawing room on the first floor, overlooking the neo Gothic Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception across the road. They have carried the red theme through the house, carpeting the dining room and the stairs up to the top floor in a colour dyed exactly to match the wallpaper.Other quirky features include an oriel window beside the first flight of stairs, which has been copied from one in an old London church; and linenfold panelling in the kitchen, which the present owners put in to match the rest of the house. In one corner, the artist, Carl Jasper, has written his name.When the current owners, who do not wish to be named, bought the house in 1976, the mural was covered by the red silk wallpaper that adorns the other walls of the dining room. They were told that there might be something beneath the paper and were amazed to find the painting, which they duly had restored.
In her autobiography, Swanson writes: "Lady Thelma Furness had a charming house on Farm Street, where her friend Wallis Simpson has kept the Prince of Wales company while Thelma was away in the States. The house was empty for the moment, so we settled in to wait for the baby and see old friends."To testify to her presence there, a mural was painted on the far wall of the dining room depicting Swanson, her films and her foibles. In the picture there is a champagne bottle and glass, a cigarette holder, a riding whip and hat, a Harlequin, some cards and a candelabra. This is now gone, as is the old walnut panelling and painted 17th-century wooden wardrobe doors in the main bedroom. But many of the original Jacobean internal doors are still there, including the linenfold panelling in the dining room.
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The original stone floors have been replaced with wide, wooden boards.Previous inhabitants of the Farm House include Thelma Furness, who was Gloria Vanderbilt's twin sister, and Gloria Swanson, who had her second child there in 1932. The impressive oak front door is carved inside and out with the heads of the 12 apostles, and the reception hall used to be lined with old Flemish linenfold panelling. One of these is the Farm House in Farm Street, an extraordinary looking building from the outside - and pretty unusual internally, too.Although its early history is unknown, except that it was a farmhouse before Mayfair was developed (there is mention of a right of way for sheep through the house in the deeds), it was rebuilt in the early 1900s by a Mrs M Strakosch in the Gothic style, with half-timbered fa?e, heavy panelling and original Jacobean doors.Strakosch took the trouble to create an authentic 16th-century house - and even put in original medieval doors and panelling. Most of the finest and grandest were built for dukes, duchesses and nobles in the 18th century. During the Second World War, a good chunk of these buildings were requisitioned as offices, because businesses were forced to relocate away from the City, but when these leases expired in the early 1990s, Mayfair began its return to the elegant residential area it once was.Among the grand houses, the cobbled mews, the Victorian mansion blocks and the new, expensive apartment blocks, there are a small number of buildings that stand out for their eccentricity. Mayfair might have the most expensive houses on the Monopoly board, but in the real world it has yet to match the exorbitant prices of Knightsbridge and Chelsea. What it does have, however, are some of London's most impressive houses - both architecturally and historically.
