London news: when Robert Tuttle was appointed American ambassador to the Court of St James's in the summer of 2005, he and his wife, Maria, chose to make their official residence, Winfield House, in Regent's Park, London, a setting for modern American art. Mrs Tuttle talks to Michael Hall about how they created a display of 'American classics'

It might be assumed that when a new American ambassador takes up residence in London, he or she will be supplied with a hefty book of instructions about Winfield House, their new home and a centre of their official social life. After all, the house is hardly a small responsibility: a substantial mansion, it sits in grounds of 12-and-a-half-acres in the northwest corner of Regent's Park, and is filled with a historic collection of furniture and works of art. Yet Maria Tuttle recalls that after her husband, Robert, was sworn in as ambassador in July 2005, the newly arrived couple were able to make the house their home with their own choice of art and accessories. 'Everything about the house is relearned with each ambassador', remarks Mrs Tuttle.

As a result, every ambassador--and every ambassador's spouse--approaches the house in a spirit of curiosity and personal discovery. This must help to explain why it so happily bears the evidence of the taste and interests of successive ambassadors' families, as all have added to its collections. Nonetheless, it has remained a harmonious unity, thanks to the strong framework created by the house's original creator, Barbara Hutton, on which is superimposed the masterly decoration carried out for Walter H. Annenberg (ambassador, 1969-74) and his wife, Lee. The rooms are so strong that they have entirely taken in their stride what may well be their most imaginative addition yet, a display of classic American modern art chosen and hung by Robert and Maria Tuttle, whose passion for 20th-century and contemporary art is long-standing. The result is an impressive testimony to the use of art as cultural diplomacy: as Mrs Tuttle tells me as we walk round the house, 'we want people to see here some of the best of American culture. The appearance of modern art is unexpected, and so people ask about it.'

The art on show is seen by a great number of visitors. In the year following the Tuttles' arrival, they entertained approximately 8,500 people; even more visited the house on garden tours and so on. As a result, the rooms have to be robust as well as handsome, and the renewal of carpets and curtains and paintwork is a constant programme. Mrs Tuttle recalls how it was decided that the Annenbergs' passementerie on the window curtains was going to have to be renewed, at great expense, only for it to be discovered with joy that an unopened packing case in storage held a complete duplicate set. She is currently overseeing the conservation of chinoiserie trapunto on some of the upholstered furniture, part of a general refreshing of the house's decoration that she and her husband have undertaken, which has included the creation of displays of their collection of porcelain and other ceramics.

This way of life, in which luxurious interiors form the backdrop to entertaining on a grand scale, is often supposed to have vanished flora London with the abandonment of the great aristocratic town palaces from the 1920s onwards, yet it has survived with little interruption in the capital's embassies and ambassadorial residences. In origins, Winfield House was itself a 'town palace', but it was built for the American plutocracy rather than the British aristocracy. In 1936 Barbara Hutton, the immensely wealthy Woolworths heiress, and her second husband, Count von Reventlow, were expecting their first child. Having moved to London to escape publicity; they bought the lease on a house in Regent's Park, St Dunstan's Villa, which was part of John Nash's plan for the park, although it was designed by Decimus Burton. Originally the home of the 3rd Marquess of Hertford--the father of the founder of the Wallace Collection--the house was occupied in the 1930s by Viscount Rothermere, but had recently been damaged by fire. Barbara Hutton replaced it with an entirely new house designed by Leonard Guthrie, an architect who had been recommended to her by Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Guthrie created an admirable setting for entertaining. At its centre is a very large hall, which doubles as a reception room. Around it is a circuit of rooms--two large drawing rooms (Fig. 4), a State Dining Room (Fig. 1) and Family Dining Room--which open into each other and open also straight onto the garden terrace. Externally, the red-brick house is Georgian in style, with more than a touch of Colonial Williamsburg about it, albeit on a 20th-century scale. Its restraint contrasts intriguingly with the villas designed by Quinlan Terry for the plutocracy of modern Britain, on the opposite side of this stretch of the Outer Circle. Inside, the house was decorated by Sheila Milbanke and Hans Sieben in the revived French 18th-century idiom that has been the preferred style of the international rich since the early days of the Rothschilds, but an oriental theme, created by Chinese furniture and textiles, was woven into the ensemble of marquetry furniture and rococo boiseries; Barbara Hutton had a notable collection of Chinese jade.

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