Home House

Three Georgian townhouses on Portman Square, numbers 19, 20 and 21, were built in the late 1770s for the Countess of Home under the architect James Wyatt, and the interiors that survive, elaborate plasterwork ceilings, a famous cantilevered staircase that seems to float without visible support, ornate fireplaces original to the build, are the real draw here, independent of anything the current club does with the building on any given night.

The house had a strange middle life before it became a club. Nearly sixty years as home to the Courtauld Institute of Art gave the rooms an academic, slightly austere use that outlasted several owners, then a period standing empty in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it made the World Monuments Watch list of the world’s most endangered sites, a genuine low point for a building of this significance. It was rescued and painstakingly restored through the 1990s, reopening as a private members’ club in 1998, which means the current incarnation is considerably younger than the architecture suggests at first glance.

As a club, Home House offers the usual private-members’ mix: several dining rooms of varying formality, a scattering of bars, a walled garden that comes into its own in summer, event spaces that host everything from quiet dinners to larger parties, and bedrooms upstairs for members staying in town rather than heading home after a late night. The architecture does most of the heavy lifting in terms of what makes the club memorable; the food and drink are competent and well presented rather than the headline act of an evening here.

It sits a little apart from Mayfair’s newer, flashier clubs in tone, drawing on its Marylebone address and its genuine eighteenth-century pedigree rather than trying to compete on nightlife or celebrity, and the membership base skews accordingly towards people who value the history as much as the socialising.

The honest caveat: membership fees are substantial, and as with most private clubs, non-members have no straightforward way to judge the current food and service for themselves ahead of joining. This is as much a review of a remarkable surviving Georgian building as it is of a dining experience, and prospective members should weigh it on those terms.