Property of the week

45, Curzon Street, W1

IT might not quite compare to Chevening, where he had grown up, but the pretty townhouse at 45, Curzon Street must have made a very convenient home for the Hon James Hamilton Stanhope. The third son of the 3rd Earl Stanhope, he was 25 and a man about town when he lived at the Mayfair address in 1813. A dashing officer (he would become brevet major in the June of that year), he had defied his father to join the army and it was for service that he left his Curzon Street home, fighting in the Peninsular War and, in 1815, at Waterloo.

It would be a few decades before another military man took up residence at Curzon Street again. James Metcalf Appleton, a former naval surgeon who had fought at Trafalgar, but had since turned to civil work, lived there for a good part of the 19th century, the first of a number of medics that called the building home. His son, chemist Thomas Cass Appleton, was still on the premises in the early 1880s when part of the house was let to another army officer, Col James Pierce Maxwell, later 9th Baron Maxwell. The MP for Co Cavan, he had also served in Crimea, where he had been wounded. He must have left Curzon Street by the time he became 9th Baron in 1884, or shortly afterwards, because, by 1888, the building belonged to Henry Roxburgh Fuller, physician to the Duke of Cambridge. He was followed, after 1911, by another doctor, Harold

Dearden. Keeping with the house’s tradition, he was not only a medic, but also a military man, serving in Flanders as surgeon in charge of the Anglo-american hospital—he would go on to become principal interrogator of German prisoners of war during the Second World War. In those years, however, a very different resident lodged in Curzon Street’s upper floors: Ivy Knight (later O’neil-dunne), a friend of Nancy Mitford’s. The author of The Pursuit

of Love was a regular guest when a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service and was said to have occasionally ventured in the street saying: ‘Come and look at the V1s. They are so pretty.’

Now with its own separate entrance at 45A, the four upper floors of the building have been turned into a striking three-bedroom home. The 2,192sq ft of living space include a magnificent master bedroom with teak wardrobes in the dressing area and Czech & Speake en suite, a Bulthaup kitchen with Gaggenau and Miele appliances, and three reception rooms. £4.5 million, Strutt & Parker (020–4586 2343; www.struttandparker.com)