Many happy returns

Robert Adam is probably Britain’s most famous architect never to have built a house. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but it is certainly the case that the greater part of Adam’s professional output consisted of remodelling the internal architecture of existing buildings and creating interior decoration for houses already built by previous hands. When it came to the leap from architect’s drawing to finished item, Adam had a greater strike rate in fancy carpets than in country houses.

And what carpets they were — invariably designed to mirror the equally elaborate ceilings that hovered many feet above them, part of the wholly integrated schemes of interior decoration pioneered by Adam, in which even the smallest detail incurred minute attention and eye-watering expense. At Osterley Park in Middlesex, having designed a bedroom, a bed and a carpet on which to stand the bed, Adam went on to design not only the counterpane but also the silk valance, a painstaking effect that Horace Walpole dismissed nevertheless as ‘too theatric’. Concerned with far more than bricks and mortar, Adam bestowed on late 18th-century Britain a legacy of gilded elegance that has never been rivalled. It is captured in Eileen Harris’s book in a series of large-scale, mostly black-and-white photographs culled from the archives of Country Life.

The Country Houses of Robert Adam testifies to Adam’s boundless invention and his facility for recycling. Aged 27 and newly arrived in Rome, Adam wrote to his sister Peggy in the spring of 1755, ‘I am antique mad …I hope to invent great things if I should never be able to execute one.’ Great things he did invent, many of them executed, even if the ambitious second-generation Scottish architect created fewer new houses than he expected at the outset of his career.