The Debenham House, as it is known, was built in Addison Road, Holland Park, in 1906 by a third-generation Arts and Crafts architect, Halsey Ricardo. By then, William Morris had been dead ten years, John Ruskin six, Queen Victoria five. The complex late-Victorian Venn diagram of intersecting arts interests – the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the Arts and Crafts designers and architects, the Utopian guilds of craftspeople – had begun to fragment. Art Nouveau was in the ascendant, there were whisperings of modernism from Europe, there were vague worries among the ruling class over the increasing militarism of Germany, but this was still the high summer of Edwardian England, a time of middle-class prosperity, colossal Empire, relative peace. Architects such as Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker, C.F.A.Voysey and Richard Norman Shaw were all actively building fine houses: it would take the Great War of 1914-1918 to abruptly end what was, even at the time, seen as an extraordinarily fertile period in English domestic architecture.

So the Debenham House marks the approaching end of an era. There was nowhere much for the Arts and Crafts movement to go after this – and for that matter, nowhere to get the decorative raw materials. Halsey Ralph Ricardo, by then in his early fifties, was known for his designs for the William de Morgan ceramics company – and for a decade at the end of the 19^th century was de Morgan’s business partner. If anything defines the ‘look’ of the later Arts and Crafts movement it is de Morgan’s richly coloured glazed tiles – he was a friend of the pre-Raphaelite set, and you see his products in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in the artist Lord Leighton’s Arabian-inspired 1866 West London house nearby (now a museum), which Ricardo later extended. But the time Ricardo received the commission for the Debenham House – 1905 – was also the year the de Morgan works closed: so Ricardo bought up much of the company’s remaining stock of tiles, both plain and fancifully decorated, to complete the interiors. It is said that they were the overstocks of a series of designs made for the Czar’s yacht and for a class of six P&O liners – which might explain the recurrence of a fish motif, though plenty of other beasts, from peacocks to eagles, are also represented.

On the exterior, he combined these tiles with pale terracotta and coloured glazed bricks from other sources to create an imperviously polychromatic house – its colours locked in beneath glaze, like the vases he used to design for de Morgan. The bottom half is green, the top half - extending right up the chimney-stacks – blue. Gazing at it across its green lawns to a blue London spring sky, you can see why Ricardo chose that particular combination – though somewhat unexpectedly he chose to return to green for his roof pantiles, thinking perhaps of the canopies of mature trees round about. Ricardo believed in smooth surfaces rather than moulded and carved ones, and used contrasting colours to achieve the traditional effects of relief. He was equally obsessive about hard, impermeable materials. Only this combination of colour and durability, he said, could truly shrug off the rigours of London’s polluted, wet climate.