South Kensington
Evelyn Gardens
The houses in Evelyn Gardens are smaller than the Italianate mansions constructed by Freake in Onslow Gardens and Cranley Gardens. They are in the Domestic Revival style.
For the most part, the houses have four main storeys (plus basements and garrets). In a deliberate swipe at the classical rules of symmetry, each house also has one additional wing rising to third floor level, which projects out of one side of the building and further forward than the main facade. It is capped with an ornate pediment, decorated with moulded bricks. This structure provides an additional room at half landing level between each storey. At ground level, the addition houses the main entrance and a porch. There are loggias above the porch set within arched recesses, which can be entered from the half-landings.
The houses have gables but they are deliberately different from each other. There are also dormer windows which in some cases have hoods.
The rear elevations to the communal garden are equally elaborate so that, looking from the communal gardens, you might be looking at the main facade of a house not its rear. The houses have bay windows on the lower floors. A modillion cornice and frieze made of terracotta runs along the facades of the houses at front and back.
Nos. 1-7 (odd) Evelyn Gardens are very different. They have three main storeys (plus basements and attics), and no side annexes. They are wider than the other houses. The entrance doors are reached through enclosed porches with arched openings onto the street. Some of the porches are decorated with decorated brick panels, and others are cement rendered.
Nos. 31-44 (consec.) have different windows. Most have sash windows with segmental heads formed from red bricks. But Nos. 36-39 are in a deliberately archaic style, known as ‘Jacobethan’, with windows constructed with stone mullions and transoms.
Most of the houses of the Smith’s Charity estate were constructed by Charles James Freake. In February 1883 he had signed a building agreement with the trustees to construct houses on an area of land in the south west corner of the estate. This was to become Evelyn Gardens (which was named after William John Evelyn, one of the Smith’s Charity trustees at the time). Freake died in October 1884 without having started work on this new site. His executors decided to find another building firm to take over the building agreement. The firm they finally selected was C. A. Daw and Son.
The firm was founded by Charles Adams Daw who had left Devon with his brothers for London in the early 1860s. They had formed a building business and had carried out works in Kensington, Paddington and St. Marylebone. In the early 1870s he had set up his own firm with his son, William Adams Daw.
The Smith’s Charity trustees agreed to the transfer of the building agreement. Daws signed the agreement of transfer with Freake’s executors on 24th April 1886. Daws must have been quite keen to secure the deal, because the executors negotiated a good profit, making Daws pay £4,000 for Freake’s plant and equipment. They also agreed to pay Freake’s estate a ground rent of £2,486-18 shillings, which was to commence in four years time (to allow time for Daws to construct and let the houses to finance it). Since Freake had agreed to pay a ground rent of only a quarter of this to the Smith’s Charity trustees, this arrangement represented a healthy turn on the deal, although it also took into account the fact that some preliminary work had been done on the site before Freake’s death. (Ultimately Daws paid Freake’s estate £50,000 to buy out Freake’s interest in the land).
Before his death Freake had been building ever larger and grander Italianate houses in Onslow Gardens and Cranley Gardens. His designs for Evelyn Gardens had been similarly grand. The Daws had recently been involved in constructing houses in De Vere Gardens and Palace Gate. They had found it increasingly difficult to dispose of larger properties. It seemed that the market now was for modestly sized houses. Equally, the old demand for houses to be provided with stables was disappearing. So they persuaded the Smith’s Charity trustees to let them build smaller houses than Freake’s building agreement with the trustees had specified. They also persuaded the trustees to dispense with the stables which were meant to be built on the north and west of the site, in continuation of Cranley Mews. Instead the extra land was laid out as additional communal gardens. Otherwise Freake’s original layout for the site was the blueprint the Daws followed.
The properties were built between 1886 and 1895. No individual architect is credited with the design. We know that for a development in Hans Road, Daws commissioned an outside architect just do detailed designs for the front elevation and sketches for the rest. So they may have used that procedure in Evelyn Gardens. C. F. A. Voysey, an architect Daws used to do the same thing in Chelsea, memorably damned the practice of using an architect only for the visible frontage of a house as a “shirt-front” arrangement.
In 1886 Daws began construction of Nos. 1-7 (odd) and 2-10 (even) Evelyn Gardens. These are the largest houses in the development with four main floors. In 1887 Daws constructed the entire northern terrace, called Evelyn Terrace at the time. This consisted of Nos. 31-44 (consec.). The trend towards smaller houses which had led the Daws to renegotiate the building agreement must have continued, because the Evelyn Terrace houses only have three main storeys and their frontages are narrower, at twenty one feet. The terraces on which Daws had started in 1886 were continued in 1888. But the new houses were even smaller than their predecessors. In 1890 work began on the long terrace of Nos. 45-70 (consec.).
In 1892 the Smith’s Charity gained possession of an organ factory and that was the subject of an additional building agreement with Daws in May 1892. The site became the southernmost part of the long communal garden at the back of the houses. By 1895 all the houses - seventy in all - had been built and almost all were sold or let.
But it is quite possible that Daws tried to do without an architect altogether and had all the designs prepared internally. Daws kept records of the development which have survived and there is no reference to an architect. In fact, a surveyor representing Freake’s trustees criticised some designs they put forward and recommended that they ought to commission an architect.
Victorian builders aimed to make their money by letting the newly created houses at a full market rent. But inevitably they would need to sell some outright to pay back the loans they had taken out to finance the development. Daws let some of the houses on twenty one year leases and sold others. In fact the Smith’s Charity’s surveyor himself took a lease on one of the houses. The usual sale prices were between £2,100 and £2,900, but sums as high as £3,400 were achieved. Daws estimated they had made a profit of about £250 on each house they sold. (At least this was what they told the tax man.)
The layout of Evelyn Gardens was regarded as a great success. As already noted, the Smith’s Charity’s own London surveyor, who presumably had supervised the design and construction, snapped up one of the houses. Workmanship was apparently higher than in other nearby developments. The occupiers themselves evidently were very pleased with the houses. Thirty eight of the original seventy occupiers were still there ten years later, and nineteen of them stayed for at least twenty years. Victorian directories reveal that there were City businessmen, some military types, including two generals, plenty of lawyers (four barristers and three solicitors), a clergyman, an engineer and a surveyor.
