Step out of the “sumptuously gothic” Farm Street church and almost directly opposite you at number 22 is Farm House, a ‘tudorbethan’ townhouse (6 beds, 5 bathrooms apparently) that has had several interesting inhabitants.
The first of these was the woman who had the house built, Marietta (or Maya) Strakosch nee Nungovich, daughter of a Cairo hotelier and sister in law to Sir Henry Strakosch, financier, chairman of The Economist and one of the people who bailed out an almost bankrupt Winston Churchill in 1938.
It was she who built the house in the early 1900s on the site of a former farmhouse called ‘Hay Hill Farm’, presumably the eponym for the street in which it stands. She wanted to create a 16th century-style residence and sourced and installed medieval doors and panelling, stone floors and 17th century wardrobe doors. It is said that there are still Jacobean internal doors within the property and walnut linenfold panelling in the dining room. This page from ‘The Sketch’ of 1930 shows some of the house’s interior decor, as does this more modern estate agent’s page (note the old door in image number five).
In 1932, divorced from Frederick Strakosch, she married Charles Amherst Villiers. Her name is given as Mme Maya de Lisle Adam in newspaper reports of the wedding – I’ve not been able to find out if there was a Mr de Lisle Adam or whether this was an affectation of hers. She is described, rather wonderfully, as either a ‘famous hostess’ or ‘society hostess’.
Amherst Villiers was an automotive engineer of genius, who worked on Donald Campbell’s first world record breaking ‘Bluebird’ and devised the ‘Blower’ Bentley, a supercharged racing car that broke the Brooklands lap record. He was a friend of Ian Fleming, who made James Bond’s personal motor a battleship grey ‘Blower’. (There is a portrait of Fleming in the NPG by Amherst Villiers.)
Anyway, back to the house, and now a bit of confusion over who lived there and when.
Various blog posts say that in the 1930s it was owned by another society hostess called Thelma, Viscountess Furness. She had married Marmaduke Furness, 1st Viscount Furness in 1926, the second marriage for both of them. She was also the lover of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) from 1930 to 1934. In 1931 she had introduced the prince to her close friend, one Wallis Simpson, with whom Edward started an affair in 1934, precipitating both the break up of the Thelma/Edward relationship and, ultimately, the 1936 Abdication Crisis. Simpson is said to have stayed in 22 Farm Street while Thelma was in the US, where she ‘entertained’ (as Wikipedia coyly puts it) the Prince of Wales.
(Another tangent here. The Furness family made their money in the North East through shipping and had a shipyard on the Tees. My, now closed and unlamented, school – Furness Comprehensive, Billingham – was named after that shipyard.)
The first bit of confusion is that in the spring of 1932 the house was rented by the actor Gloria Swanson (Norma Desmond in ‘Sunset Boulevard’), who gave birth to her daughter Michelle Bridget Farmer while living here.
The next bit is that on the Getty Images site there are three photos from the summer of 1933 one of which shows Maya still living in the house, (There are also a couple of inside shots of the house here and here.) and Amherst Villier’s address in 1940 is still listed as Farm Street.
What this means for the Thelma Furness story I don’t know, and there is also a big gap in the (online) history of the place until we get to the 1950s, when the house seems to be being used by the (then) nearby US embassy in Grosvenor Square as a residence for diplomats and visiting dignitaries. According to a blue plaque* on the house, President John F Kennedy visited Farm Street in 1961.
(*Three blue plaques adorn the property, citing Furness, Swanson and Kennedy, but look closely as these aren’t ‘official’ English Heritage plaques, but carry the attribution ‘Farm House Heritage’. I smell an estate agent bigging up the place.)
If you wanted to live here then number 22 was on the market a couple of years ago and sold for a cool £10 million.
