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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1774-76
Notes
In 1765 Chamier purchased three estates in Surrey including The Elms and Fennells Place, and he engaged Adam to make designs for alterations to both. He first worked at Fennells Place, and then from 1774 he made designs for the park and house at The Elms. The Elms had been built in c1715 and it was the house in which Chamier was living at the time of his death. Adam made designs for the ceilings of the hall, ante room, dining room and drawing room, and the addition of two large rooms. These changes were certainly made, but it is not known if the executed works follow the surviving drawings as the house was demolished in c1825. Moreover, Adam made designs for a conservatory, a garden seat, and a temple, but these were not executed.
Now known as Clock House, the Elms was replaced with the extant house in the 1820s, although this was also called the Elms for around a century.
See also: Fennells Place, Ewell, Surrey
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, index pp. 13, 65; E. Harris, The furniture of Robert Adam, 1963, Index p. 49; I. Nairn, and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: Surrey, 1971, p. 219; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, pp. 179, 213, Volume II, pp. 183, 218; J. Brooke, 'Chamier, Anthony (1725-80), of Epsom, Surrey', History of Parliament online, 2012
Frances Sands, 2012
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).