Ham House & Garden

About Ham House & Garden

Historic house museum in Ham, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England, UK

This 17th-century aristocratic house, named after the riverside village in which it stands, is set in formal gardens on the bank of the River Thames south of Richmond in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, a mile or so upriver from Richmond riverside. The original house was completed in 1610 for Thomas Vavasour, an Elizabethan courtier and Knight Marshal to James I, and was then leased and later bought by William Murray, a close friend and supporter of Charles I. The English Civil War saw the house sequestrated, but Murray's wife Catherine regained it on payment of a fine, and his daughter Elizabeth, Countess of Dysart, navigated the prevailing anti-royalist sentiment to keep control of the estate after her father's death in 1655. The house reached its greatest prominence after Elizabeth's second marriage, to John Maitland, 1st Duke of Lauderdale, in 1672. The Lauderdales held important roles at the court of the restored Charles II and began an ambitious programme of development and embellishment: the house was almost doubled in size and equipped with private apartments for the Duke and Duchess and princely suites for visitors, furnished to the highest standards of courtly taste and decorated with "a lavishness which transcended even what was fitting to their exalted rank". They assembled notable collections of paintings, textiles and furniture and redesigned the gardens to reflect their status. Later generations of the Dysart family preserved the house and its contents with little change, so that it is today one of the most complete surviving 17th-century houses in Europe, with its original furniture and textiles, now in the care of the National Trust together with its formal gardens, orchard, cherry garden and cafe.

Where:

London, United Kingdom