CLICK ON ANY OF THESE IMAGES FOR A FREE STREAMING SUBSCRIPTION OF HYLAND, a digital lifestyle magazine featuring residential decoration, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, cuisine, good works and reflections.
Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/117778
small mews entrance. He linked the two houses by building a bridge between them at the second-floor level and made that space into his library. The elevation at No. 20 didn't mesh very well with No. 1, however, and Beckford decided to sell off Lansdown West, bricking up the west end of the bridge – and then, several years later, purchasing No. 19 next door and creating his famous Grecian library on the ground floor. The Grecian library is perhaps better known than the bridge, largely because the diarist James Lees-Milne lived there for many years, but the flat my friends inherited includes the pièce de résistance of the entire confabulation: Beckford's picture gallery, which measured 43 by 28 feet, with an elaborate 16foot ceiling and beautiful paintings by Raphael, Bellini, Velasquez, and other old masters hanging on its walls (many of them now hang on the walls of the National Gallery in London). At the beginning of the 1980s, the townhouse was converted into five flats on five stories and the picture gallery was cut down (quite effectively so) in order to create a second bedroom and a second bath, but the reception room itself still measures 31 by 28 feet and is among the largest private rooms in Bath. When friends enter it for the first time, I experience a second or two of stunned silence, occasionally followed by an expletive HYLAND