Dating from 1726, the five-storey, mellow red brick house has experienced all the changing fortunes of the Spitalfields area. Shortly after it was built, Fournier Street became the home of Huguenot silk weavers fleeing religious persecution in France, then of waves of Irish, Jewish and Bengali immigrants in the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. When actor and writer Rodney Archer acquired the house - for a now very enviable song - in the early 1980s, the area had just survived demolition threats but was still down-at-heel; unloved and as yet undiscovered by fashionable London. Behind the nasty laminated panels with which a taxi firm had covered the inside walls, Rodney discovered room after room of original 18thc. wooden panelling; the whole original interior of the house, in fact, lying hidden beneath successive layers of supposed improvements and DIY accretions.
Since then, while much of the uncovered panelling has been deliberately left in its richly patinated, time-worn and distressed condition, other areas have been enhanced with superb, dramatic effect. This is focussed on the first floor, which consists of some beautiful and surprising interiors. A charming, red-ochre painted library with all its original features and the cosy atmosphere of Georgian gentleman’s closet is dramatically balanced by the larger main room. Here, the panelling is completely covered in deeply burnished silver leaf, framed in buttery yellow gold and bordered with battens and cornices painted a rich, vivid Prussian blue. A large Victorian silvered witch ball on an ornate wrought iron stand rolls the whole into a concentrated globe of colour, but the main focus of the room is Oscar Wilde’s fireplace and overmantel from his house in Tite Street, Chelsea. This chimneypiece is a fine, almost architectural Arts and Crafts ensemble which Rodney acquired in the 1970s, rescuing it in a commendable act of conservation heroism - and with the exchange of a ten pound note - from an ignominious end in a builder’s skip.
