Sambourne House

Sambourne House was the family home of Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910), chief cartoonist of Punch, and it survives very much as the family left it. The terrace was built in 1868 by the builder Joseph Gordon Davis on the Phillimore Estate; Linley and Marion Sambourne bought the lease in 1875 and redecorated the house in the aesthetic style as soon as they moved in, hanging Morris & Co. papers, setting stained glass into the windows and painting stylised flowers onto the doors. Over the next thirty-five years he kept adding to it. An inventory taken in 1877, after only two years in the house, already counted over fifty vases, seventy chairs and around seven hundred framed pictures. Three generations of the family then left the rooms alone, and it was here, in February 1958, that the Victorian Society was founded. The house is listed Grade II* and reopened to the public on 15 October 2022 after a long restoration.

The plan is a Victorian townhouse plan, and the museum shows it whole. The dining room sits at the front of the raised ground floor and the morning room behind it, extended outwards by about three feet in 1875 and given a larger window so Sambourne could work there. The entire first floor is one front-to-back drawing room, papered to the ceiling and hung with pictures frame to frame, where he later moved his easel. Above are the two main bedrooms, and in the attic the studio he made out of the old nursery once his daughter married, with the maid's bedroom beside it. Between them runs the hall and staircase, encaustic-tiled and lit by stained glass.

Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Museums runs the house together with Leighton House, eight minutes' walk away, through one events team. What the museum publishes for Sambourne House is location hire: the hall, dining room, morning room, drawing room, both bedrooms, the studio and the maid's bedroom are offered for filming and photography, and A Room With a View, Arthur & George and Life in Squares were all shot here. The two houses are described together as venues for entertaining, but every itemised dinner, reception and concert the museums publish is at Leighton House, where the terms state that dancing and amplified music are not permitted. Nothing equivalent is published for Sambourne House, and no capacity for it appears anywhere, so numbers and what the rooms will carry are a conversation with the events manager. Roy's room has been closed to visitors for restoration works since October 2024.