01/09/2026
🏺The staircase that leads to ancient Greece
🏛️ The Staircase Hall at Spencer House is one of those interiors where the journey matters as much as the destination. Begun under John Vardy and altered by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart after 1758, the staircase leads from the Palladian ground floor into the Neoclassical State Rooms above, turning the act of ascending into a carefully staged encounter with antiquity.
🇬🇷 Stuart transformed the upper part of the hall into an imagined Greek temple. Columns are linked by garlands as if prepared for a festival, while the barrel-vaulted ceiling completes the illusion. Above the landing, Vardy’s great Palladian window remains, creating a fascinating dialogue between the architecture of the two men, and between Palladian Rome and Stuart’s newly discovered Greece.
🪨 Even the underside of the landing carries the story further. Its richly carved timber soffit is based on published drawings of the Roman ruins at Palmyra in Syria, while Stuart replaced Vardy’s original Roman-style brackets with flat supports decorated with a Greek fret. Ancient Rome and Greece were therefore assembled into a new eighteenth-century architectural language.
🎭 Then comes the optical trick. The delicate metal balustrade is painted to resemble luxurious fabric festoons, creating a trompe-l’œil effect in which something that looks soft and textile is actually fretted metal. The present decoration was recreated during the 1980s restoration using evidence from the surviving original paint layers.
🕯️ Hanging above the staircase is an extraordinary Venetian gilt repoussé copper and bronze lantern, traditionally believed to have come from the Bucentaur, the ceremonial state barge of the Doges of Venice. Its presence adds another layer to an interior already built from fragments of different antiquities, cultures and architectural traditions.
Spencer House
