Of the ring-tailed lemurs you may have known over the years, how many could boast that they had a centrally heated Art Deco bedroom? Mah-jongg could: he was the exotic pet of an exotic couple, Stephen and Virginia Courtauld, of the wealthy textiles family. The beast's quarters are still to be seen at the heart of Eltham, the house in south-east London the Courtaulds built in 1933. In a move that pained some antiquarians at the time, they blithely tacked their new home on to a medieval great hall that had once been part of a royal palace, a place of diversion for Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
The Courtaulds commissioned two young architects, Seely and Paget, to design the house in the brick-and-stone style of Wren's Hampton Court. Then the interior decorators moved in - and how. It's largely their work that makes the restored Eltham one of the more unusual stately homes, open for inspection since earlier this year.
Step into the triangular entrance hall with its soothingly rounded corners, and the immediate impression is of a place of lightsomeness and space, an effect the Courtaulds sought as an antidote to the period decor of heavy Edwardian gloom. Rolf Engstromer, a Swede, designed this atrium. Its walls are lined in Australian blackbean veneer with marquetry panels, and minimally furnished by white tub chairs arranged round an austere coffee table. A circular rug of geometrical abstract design in russets and pinkish fawns echoes the shape of the light-pierced dome overhead.
The original rug, by Marion Dorn, is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but an exact replica was commissioned by English Heritage from Donegal Carpets. It's the only company in these islands still using the technique of hand-knotting, and weavers spent 50 days to produce the rug, which is 19 foot in diameter.
Throughout the house, rare blond woods predominate in furniture and wall-linings (Australian blackbean, aspen, pearwood, bird's eye maple) alongside cream or powderblue painted walls and curved cool surfaces. But the Scandinavian plainness is relieved, especially in the Courtaulds' private rooms, by some startling eclectic detail.
Virginia's bedroom, for example, has the air of a pagan temple, with its curved walls lined in maplewood, pictures representing the elements air, water and fire, copied from originals by Jan Breughel, and figures of a salamander and a phoenix flanking the (electric) fire.
Much of this distinctiveness was supplied by the Italian "society" designer, Count Peter Malacrida (who spent his declining years in Ireland). In the drawing room, the rich, vibrant hues of Turkish-style rugs and 16th century Italian majolica on the open shelves set off the pale-painted walls. By contrast, the dining room's bland maplewood-lined walls are punctuated by black-and-silver panels featuring the angular Greek-key motif, and the whole is canopied by a central ceiling area above the long dining table, finished in aluminium leaf and illuminated by concealed lighting.
Here the Courtaulds entertained the good and the great of the political, artistic and business worlds such as Rab Butler, Sir Kenneth Clark, Michael Balcon and Lord Bective, while the loudspeaker system carried the strains of Noel Coward and Bert Ambrose to all the ground-floor rooms from a gramophone.
The effect striven for throughout is of restrained, elegant comfort enlivened by eccentric touches, but Virginia's bathroom loses the plot somewhere and speaks at the top of its voice of opulence, or (not to mince words) vulgarity. The bath is set into a goldmosaic alcove with classical statuary, the gold-plated taps dispense water through a lion's mouth, and the walls are lined in onyx.
The guest bathrooms had to be content with Vitrolite on the walls. And that use of the Pilkington glass company's latest hygienic, easy-clean surfacing material illustrates another thing about the Courtaulds: they were determinedly up-to-date, and could afford to be. The newest technology was installed throughout the house. There were Kelvinator refrigerators and stainless steel sinks in the kitchen. An internal phone system connected all the rooms. Gas-driven central-heating coils in some of the ceilings warmed the rooms and provided heated towel rails in the bathrooms. And the maid had only to plug the vacuum-cleaner hose into a socket in the skirting board for an electric pump in the basement to suck out all the dust.
Perversely, after all that effort, the Courtaulds abandoned Eltham after a bare decade to live in Scotland and later Rhodesia, and for the following half-century it was used mainly by the army for educational purposes. But now, a time capsule of the decorative arts of two generations ago, the house is again open to the public It can be visited for the coming winter months on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The nearest railway stations are Mottingham and New Eltham, from Charing Cross.