This house built in c.1862 on the Gunter estate in Brompton, was first occupied by the widow of Colonel Sir Joshua Jebb, a military engineer and the designer of several prisons, including Pentonville and Broadmoor.
Later residents included the Jennings family, members of whom lived at the house for forty-two years from 1911. Gertrude Jennings was a dramatic author, who enjoyed great success in the first quarter of the 20th century with plays such as No Servants and The New Poor. Her brother Richard was literary editor and leader writer of the Daily Mirror. He was a well-known bibliophile, filling the house with books, and his many friends in literary and intellectual circles. These included Virginia Woolf and others in the Bloomsbury Group, Clifford Kitchin, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell.