Lord Leighton's Arab Hall in London reopens after 18-year restoration

The former London home of Lord Frederic Leighton reopened on Saturday with a new restoration providing a glimpse into the sumptuous, carefully curated world of Victorian artists.

The Victorian era was in thrall to the “House Beautiful”, encapsulating tiles laid in intricate patterns, mouldings leafy and ornate, and iron fireplaces florally festooned. Artists took it one step further, constructing “studio-houses”, where the house itself was a work of art, as well as a place where art could be made.

Lord Leighton’s abode, in the then-rural enclave of Holland Park, West London, was one of the prime examples of this type of living. And, after 18 years of painstaking conservation and restoration, costing £8 million ($8.88 million), its original splendour is ready to be enjoyed once again.

Leighton House started as a relatively modest brick dwelling and was extended over the years. A large, glass-enclosed studio allowed in as much light as possible — always helpful in the UK’s dark winters, but even more necessary in the smog of late 19th-century London. A salon, the walls gridded with paintings by the artist and others, gave Lord Leighton a place to welcome guests and, on his popular “Show Sundays”, the curious public.

At the house’s centre is the astounding Arab Hall. Arranged as an enclosed courtyard, the walls are covered in Iznik tiles that the well-travelled artist had bought in Syria, Egypt and Turkey. Nooks provide space for lounging and a water feature cools the space. Above, a small mashrabiya overlooks Leighton’s fantasy of Ottoman Empire life – a classic example of British Orientalism.

“Little is known about the Arab Hall,” says Daniel Robbins, the senior curator of Leighton House. The only comment attributable to Leighton was a throwaway one — that he needed something to do with all the tiles he bought.

That remark — if accurate — is almost certainly facetious, the curator says. “We know it came out of an aesthetic interest, rather than a scholarly one,” he continues. “And, it’s entirely unique among artists’ studio-houses.” But its direct influences or Leighton’s own motivations are unclear.

Born in 1830 in Yorkshire and raised in Germany, Lord Leighton brought a range of interests, from Arab motifs to old master paintings, to his exquisitely rendered canvases. He had an affinity for poignant vignettes: Michelangelo nursing his ailing servant; a young girl feeding berries to her mother, lounging in bed; a couple on their honeymoon, leaning in close.

At the age of 26, he made a headline-grabbing debut at the Royal Academy with a painting of the Madonna being carried through the streets of Florence. Prince Albert was so taken he convinced his wife, Queen Victoria, to buy it. Later, Lord Leighton was elected president of the Royal Academy and used his influence there, over an 18-year period, to raise the profile and importance of artists in Britain's cultural landscape.

After his death in 1896, the furnishings of his house were sold in a Christie’s auction lasting eight days. His house became the property of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and, after the Second World War, the local council hosted a library in a cheap 1950s retrofitting of Leighton’s adored building.

All of this work has been undone in the restoration, which started in 2018 after a private fundraising initiative, in partnership with the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Kensington and Chelsea Council, raised money for the conservation work. Leighton House worked with the architecture firm BDP to bring the house back to its former glory, adding a gallery in a dug-out basement and a spiral staircase to allow accessibility to all floors.

The final touch was the recovery of the objects, which Robbins described as the "perfect Covid-19 lockdown activity". He and his team tracked down some on eBay, and commissioned replicas of others, drawing on images and descriptions in press reports from the time. Two new dark wooden cabinets, with thin inlay patterns, flank the entrance to his conservatory-like studio, standing sombrely at the exit from the vast salon.

Leighton House also sought new works for its reopening. They collaborated with Syrian artisans from Turquoise Mountain, an NGO supporting traditional handicrafts across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia region, on bespoke inlaid tables and desks that greet visitors — quite a luxe entrance versus the usual MDF get-up of tables as brochure holders. One imagines Lord Leighton might have been more interested in this grandeur than in the idea of the contemporary — the vast aesthetic excess of the house suggests a man in love with beauty in any form, whether old or new.

The house has also commissioned a mural from Iranian-Canadian artist Shahrzad Ghaffari to run alongside the new staircase. Ghaffari used writings about “oneness” by 13th-century poet Rumi as her inspiration, painting his words 11 metres high in thick, swirling calligraphy that rises up the coiling walls. She drew on Leighton’s home for her palette, with the intense blues of her lettering referring to the turquoise tiles in the Narcissus Hall, opposite the Arab Hall, and the muted reds pointing to the exterior brickwork. But most wonderful of all here is the texture: up close, the different elements of the paintwork separate from each other and become almost 3D, a topographical display of the layers of time that have been built up between the original vision of Lord Leighton and the museum display of today.

The commission by Ghaffari also renegotiates the potentially tricky legacy of the Arab Hall. While a thing of wonder, it is also marked by the lack of accuracy at play in Orientalism, or 19th-century European and American artists' fantasies of Arab life, which often bears the air of thick pastiche. It’s also hard to ignore the context: Victorian wealth came from the country’s industrial factories as well as its beneficial trade policies with its colonies — whose cultural forms and identities were often translated back in stereotyped canvases of the “Arab”, lounging on a divan much like the one Lord Leighton installed in his home.

The debates over Orientalism are rarely touched upon by the museum, which focuses on the British context of the Victorian artists’ home studios. It also unveils a partnership with the nearby Sambourne House, the less grand home of Edward Linley Sambourne, a cartoonist for Victorian magazine Punch.

For Leighton House, the invitation to an Iranian artist to create her own mural is a nice codicil to this history of misunderstanding and acquisition.

“The message of the mural is very important,” says Ghaffari. “It’s about bringing together East and West. We shouldn't be afraid of different cultures.

"If we bring them together and put them beside each other, their beauty multiplies. And this is what exactly happened here. And I hope that this message goes to future generations, which will embrace different cultures: the message of oneness.”