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Duchess Street
Duchess Street runs east to west in the W1W postal district, extending from Mansfield Street on the west to Hallam Street on the east, crossing Portland Place roughly at its midpoint. It takes its name from Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, reflecting the Portland family's long ownership of this part of Marylebone before the estate passed to the Howard de Walden family in 1879.
The street's most significant building history centres on what became number 10. Robert Adam designed a stable and coach house on the site in 1769 to 1771 as part of his work on the Portland Place development. That mews building, Grade II listed since 1954, is now incorporated into the premises of the British Medical Association.
The wider site acquired considerable cultural importance when Thomas Hope, the Anglo-Dutch collector, writer, and design theorist, purchased the main house in 1799. Hope remodelled the interior extensively, creating a sequence of rooms in Egyptian, Indian, and Neoclassical styles that became some of the most discussed interiors of the Regency period. He published his approach in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration in 1807, a work that introduced the term interior decoration into the English language and exercised wide influence on subsequent design. A Flemish Picture Gallery was added to the house in 1819. The Wigmore Street end of Portland Place, of which Duchess Street is a northern spur, preserves much of this late Georgian urban scale.
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