Description:The Sutherland Collection includes the ‘particulars and conditions of sale’ for ‘that distinguished freehold estate’ called ‘Melrose Hall’. Melrose Hall was situated at West Hill, Wandsworth, ‘only six miles from town’.
The particulars state that the estate would be sold at auction ‘at Garraway’s Coffee House’ in London on 24th June 1824.
The document appears to have functioned as an advertisement, promoting the estate to potential investors. We are told that Melrose Hall had been ‘erected regardless of Expense’, and was ‘fitted and finished in the most Chaste and Costly manner’.
The mansion house itself contained ‘numerous lofty and well proportioned bed rooms & dressing rooms’ alongside ‘a noble vestibule’ and a number of ‘elegant drawing rooms’. In addition to these, Melrose Hall included a ‘Gentleman’s room’, a ‘billiard room’ and the facilities to provide ‘hot & cold baths’.
Melrose Hall was surrounded by coach houses and stabling, and ‘extensive’ grounds including flower gardens and ‘Serpentine Gravel Walks’. A conservatory and greenhouses belonged to the property, in addition to a ‘large and very productive kitchen garden’ which was ‘clothed with the choicest Fruit Trees, in full bearing’.
The mansion house was surrounded by almost sixty acres of land commanding a view of ‘the surrounding Romantic Country, and the floating Scenery of the River Thames’.
Documents in the Sutherland Papers indicate that the Marquis of Stafford, George Granville Leveson-Gower (1785-1833) purchased Melrose Hall in 1824. The Marquis renamed the property West Hill and made the house into his mansion near to London.