This house forms part of a terrace built in the early 1880s in the red brick Queen Anne style. Until the outbreak of the First World War, the street was at the heart of a thriving avant-garde community of artists, writers and bohemians in Chelsea. Here lived and worked artists such as the flamboyant James McNeill Whistler, Augustus John and John Singer Sargent. A few doors away at Oscar Wilde's house, the greatest artistic and literary figures of the day were entertained in the buttercup-yellow drawing room with its ceiling painted by Whistler and Edwin Godwin. It was there, in June 1894, that the Marquess of Queensberry called on Wilde, unannounced, and threatened to 'thrash' him.
Residents of this house in the 1950s included Czech designer Miroslav Smutny, and Bohuslav Brouk, a biologist, philosopher and writer. Later the mountaineer Eric Shipton lived in the basement flat.