The room where couples marry and dance at The Lansdowne Club in Mayfair was never built as a ballroom. Robert Adam planned it as the library of a great town house off Berkeley Square in the 1760s, but his scheme went up only as a shell. George Dance the Younger redesigned it from 1788, Robert Smirke completed it as a sculpture gallery in 1819, and it became a ballroom in 1935, when what remained of Lansdowne House opened as a private members’ club. Today the same room holds civil ceremonies, wedding breakfasts and first dances beneath its coffered ceiling, in a building with 73 bedrooms of its own.
Bute, Shelburne and the peace with America
John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, bought the empty site to the south of Berkeley Square in 1761 and asked Adam to design a house. Bute was the King’s chief minister in 1762 and 1763, and in 1765 he sold the unfinished building to William Petty, second Earl of Shelburne, who agreed to keep to Adam’s designs and moved his family in, still incomplete, in 1768. Shelburne was made first Marquess of Lansdowne in 1784, and Shelburne House became Lansdowne House.
Shelburne was prime minister when he negotiated the peace with America in 1782, and his friend Benjamin Franklin was the chief American signatory of the Treaty of Paris. By tradition he drafted the treaty in the Round Room, a circular domed room that Adam completed in 1776 and Dance remodelled in 1792, with a painted neoclassical frieze, a marble chimneypiece and mahogany doors. It is a rare surviving interior by Dance, and today it is the Club’s Round Room Cocktail Bar.
Adam’s library took more than half a century to finish. Shelburne began collecting paintings and antique statues in Italy in 1771; his son sold most of the collection, and the third Marquess, who succeeded in 1809 and built it up again, had Smirke finish Adam’s library as a sculpture gallery between 1816 and 1819. In 1870 Thomas Henry Wyatt added a second gallery in the Gothic style. Many of the Lansdowne marbles, the Lansdowne Hercules and the Lansdowne Amazon among them, were later bought by museums in Britain and America.
Through the nineteenth century the house was at the centre of political society. After fire destroyed the Houses of Parliament in 1834, the Privy Council met in its Dining Room until the new Palace of Westminster was built, and Charles Dickens and Lord Macaulay were among its visitors. The fifth Marquess, Viceroy of India from 1888, negotiated the Entente Cordiale as Foreign Secretary, and during the First World War the house served as a first aid station.
A family wedding, and then a road
The last grand family party at Lansdowne House was given for a wedding. The bride was Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the ninth Duke of Devonshire and, through her mother, granddaughter of the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne. She married Harold Macmillan, who had served on her father’s staff in Canada, at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 21 April 1920, with royalty, aristocracy and leading writers among the guests. Macmillan was prime minister from 1957 to 1963. After the wedding the fifth Marquess let the house to Gordon Selfridge, the American owner of the Selfridges department store.
The sixth Marquess sold Lansdowne House in 1929. Its new owner was refused permission to replace it with a hotel of fifteen storeys, and in 1931 the house was cut back for a planned road between Berkeley Square and Curzon Street. Adam’s front range was demolished and his façade reinstated forty feet further back, Charles Fox extended the building with interiors by White Allom, and two of Adam’s rooms crossed the Atlantic: the First Drawing Room is displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Great Eating Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The road itself was shelved, the cul-de-sac outside was named Fitzmaurice Place in 1935, and the extension of Curzon Street was not built until 1964.
The Lansdowne Club opened on 1 May 1935 and, unlike other London clubs of its day, admitted men and women with equal status from the start. The surviving Georgian rooms were joined by Art Deco ones, among them a 25-yard swimming pool, and the building has been listed Grade II* since 1970, its Adam and Art Deco interiors included.
Smirke’s gallery as a wedding room
Smirke’s room was conceived as a Roman imperial hall. Its segmental coffered ceiling survives, reset in the 1930s by Fox to carry the floors above, with Smirke’s rosettes kept and his giant pilasters still on the walls. Fox turned the high domed rotundas into alcoves and installed balconies railed with the iron balustrade from the house’s original grand staircase, and those galleries now look down on wedding dinners.
The Ballroom is licensed for civil ceremonies. It seats 150 in rows for the vows, 190 for a seated dinner and 200 for a standing reception, and a wedding can stay in the one room from the ceremony through the speeches to the first dance. The adjoining Long Gallery, which overlooks the Courtyard, takes the drinks reception.
The Adam Room, the Courtyard and the Crush Hall
For a smaller ceremony, the Adam Room is a drawing room of the 18th century with soft pastel walls, a fine fireplace and a ceiling painted with frescoes, and it holds up to 80 guests.
The Courtyard is an outdoor space with a retractable roof, so it can be used in any season. It takes the drinks, the photographs or an outdoor ceremony, and it is also the Club’s Courtyard Brasserie. Inside, the Crush Hall at the heart of the house keeps original 18th century features under a high ceiling and a chandelier, with rich wall coverings and antique furniture, and it is the room used for cutting the cake.
Smaller weddings have rooms of their own. The Shelburne Room, with its own anteroom, takes 20 to 50 guests. The Findlay Room, decorated in the Art Deco style and overlooking the Courtyard, seats 18 for an intimate wedding dinner or the dinner the night before, and The Library by Henry Brosi takes 12 at a chef’s table, with each course presented by the Executive Head Chef.
From the Club’s kitchen
Catering is in house. Henry Brosi writes the wedding menus, and his Dining Room cooking is built on seasonal British produce. Every package includes a menu tasting and a wedding co-ordinator, a red carpet arrival, the bridal suite with a bottle of Champagne on the wedding night, and dinner for two in the Dining Room on the first anniversary.
Packages start from £200 per guest. Each covers venue hire from noon to midnight, a drinks reception with canapés, a wedding breakfast of three courses with half a bottle of house wine, and a glass for the toast, and minimum numbers apply. Couples who would rather bring their own caterer can take the Ballroom and the Long Gallery on a dry hire basis.
Staying in the house
The Club has 73 rooms and suites, and their refurbishment began in 2023. The suites take their rose, pale green and heather blue colours, with touches of gold, from the Club’s Art Deco interiors, and the Deluxe Suites add a separate sitting room and a marble bathroom. A suite for the couple is included in the wedding packages. Overnight guests have a full English breakfast in the Dining Room and the use of the Hiro Miyoshi hair and beauty salon, the gym and the 25-yard Art Deco pool, a sunken basin that once had diving boards.
Rooms are booked on the Club’s terms. Reservations open no more than six months ahead, non-member guests aged 16 and over pay a temporary membership fee of £25 a night, and children under six cannot stay from Monday to Friday afternoon. When the house is full, the Club can suggest nearby clubs and hotels.
The Club stands at 9 Fitzmaurice Place, off the south-west corner of Berkeley Square. Green Park and Bond Street Underground stations are within walking distance, and Victoria is close for mainline trains. For other Mayfair weddings, read our Edits on The Dorchester and The May Fair, or see weddings in Mayfair and the United Kingdom Wedding Atlas.
Choosing the room
The first decision is the size of the guest list, because it chooses the room. A wedding of 20 to 50 fits the Shelburne Room, whose package is the one from which prices start; a larger one belongs in the Ballroom, under Smirke’s ceiling, with up to 190 at dinner. Read The Lansdowne Club profile and check your date.
