DESIGNED BY SIR WILLIAM CHAMBERS, CIRCA 1765

The elegantly carved Ionic door-cases with Apollonian laurelled tablets in George III French antique manner and mouldings en suite, were designed in the late 1760s for a Parlour at no. 56 Berners Street by the Rome-trained court architect Sir William Chambers (d. 1796). Their festoons of ribboned laurels with 'Grecian' pendant baguettes, relate to the ornament of a chimneypiece featured in Chambers' Treatise on the Decorative part of Civil Architecture, 1759 (pl. 46, fig. 9). And, together with the palms wrapping the door-frames' echinus mouldings, they serve to evoke Apollo's Mount Parnassus triumph as poetry-deity; while such decorative elements also harmonised with the room's stuccoed ceiling (J. Harris and M. Snodin, Sir William Chambers, London, 1997, fig. 198). The latter's central medallion compartment was mosaiced with beribboned laurels tied to a reeded medallion frame and wreathing a palm-flower, that recall a temple ceiling pattern published in Robert Wood's, Ruins of the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra, 1753. The doors' antique-fluted pilasters echoed those of the room's Ionic pillared marble chimneypiece, whose frieze tablet likewise displayed a ribboned garland. The door entablatures are also flowered in Grecian ribbon-frets, and echo the Grecian fret that wreaths the room's chair-rail, alongside an Etruscan-fashioned 'Venus' pearl-string. The same patterned doors were introduced at another house in Berners Street (no. 21), which adjoined that of Chambers' partners, the plasterer Thomas Collins (d. 1830) at number 20.