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Number 3 Robert Street is located on the south-west corner with the Royal Terrace. Numbers 1-3 Robert Street were some of the earliest buildings in London to be built as chambers or tenements, and this is one of the few of Adam’s Adelphi buildings to survive, albeit much altered, and with a dormer storey added in 1908.
From 1778-86 this was the home of Robert and James Adam themselves, having moved from 4 Royal Terrace. Their office was located at number 12 John Street. In 1786 Robert and James moved to number 13 Albermarle Street.
In the early nineteenth century this house became the Caledonian Hotel.
Level
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).
Contents of Number 3, corner of Robert Street and Royal Terrace
- Design for the ceiling for the back drawing room, 1775, as executed (1)
- Design for the ceiling for the front parlour, 1775, as executed (1)