Painters & Decorators on Cheyne Row, Chelsea SW3

Cheyne Row is among the most complete and architecturally significant Georgian streets in London. Built in the early eighteenth century — most of the houses date from around 1708–1720 — the row presents a remarkably intact face of Queen Anne and early Georgian domestic architecture: two-and-a-half-storey brick terraces with tall sash windows, simple but elegant door surrounds with pediments and fanlights, and the beautiful human scale of early Georgian town building. The street is best known as the long home of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian historian and essayist, who lived at number 24 from 1834 until his death in 1881 and whose house is now a National Trust property preserved as it was in his lifetime. But the whole row shares the historic significance of number 24: most of the houses are Grade II listed, and together they form one of the finest sequences of early-eighteenth-century domestic architecture surviving in inner London. Interior spaces in Cheyne Row properties are of considerable period quality: panelled rooms with raised-and-fielded panel dado rails, original fireplace surrounds, original timber staircases with elegant turned balusters, and ceiling heights of around 2.8 to 3 metres that feel generous given the modest scale of the exteriors. Paint systems for Cheyne Row must be selected with particular care for the building's age and construction: these are among the oldest inhabited buildings in Chelsea, and the materials — lime mortar, lime plaster, soft historic bricks — all require breathable paint systems that complement rather than conflict with the building's natural behaviour.