This house was built in c.1862 on the Gunter estate in Brompton.  It was occupied from 1868 by a City architect, Alfred Allen, who lived here for some twenty-five years with his wife and civil engineer son.  Unbeknownst to his parents, however, the son (supposedly a bachelor) had a wife and children tucked away in Battersea - rigid Victorian class distinctions and the importance of respectability made this a not uncommon set-up.

Later residents included a Paymaster-in-Chief of the Royal Navy, a retired admiral, and Sir Ernest Birch, who had served as the eighth British Resident of Perak from 1904 to 1911.  

Multi-occupied after the Second World War, from 1967 the house became a hostel for nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, before its eventual return to private use.