Irish author, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde’s former Mayfair home which provided inspiration for The Importance of Being Earnest is for sale for £14 million with Beauchamp Estates.
The six-storey, stucco-fronted townhouse at 14 Half Moon Street was built around 1730. In the early 1880s, at the centre of Victorian bohemian London, the property was turned into a boarding house with “bachelors chambers” for young, ambitious male tenants to rent.
Among them were the novelist Hugh Walpole, the World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon and actor and costumier Raoul “Reggie” de Veulle. Wilde’s lover, the journalist Robbie Ross, lived at number 40.
Wilde, therefore, was a frequent visitor to Half Moon Street, using number 14 as the inspiration for Algernon Moncrieff’s bachelor pad in The Importance of Being Earnest, where the first Act is set.
The play opens in the property’s morning room, which is “luxuriously and artistically furnished”, with a piano playing in the background, and afternoon tea being laid. Fictional visitors to the townhouse include Moncrieff’s friend Ernest Worthing, his cousin Gwendolen Fairfax and her mother — his aunt — Lady Bracknell.
Wilde also frequented the pub next door (now the Flemings Hotel, with an Oscar Wilde-inspired VIP suite), and was a member of the Albemarle Club a short walk away. He was known to buy carnations for his buttonhole at nearby Burlington Arcade.
After he moved to London in 1879, Wilde took lodgings on Mayfair’s Charles Street, later moving to 34 Tite Street in Chelsea when he married Constance Lloyd in 1884.
Following the Second World War, 14 Half Moon Street was converted into offices, before being returned to a single residence in 2008.
In 2016, it was purchased by an Emirati multi-millionaire, who bought it as student digs for his daughter during her studies.
The owner paid £13.5 million for the house, according to the Land Registry — £1.45 million less than its asking price at the time.
Today, the five-bedroom townhouse spans more than 5,000 square feet over seven floors, each serviced by a private passenger lift.
Downstairs, there is an entrance hall with geometric patterned marble flooring and a marble fireplace, with a large, open plan kitchen and breakfast room.
Upstairs, on the first floor, is a reception room with a bay window and a cocktail bar, as well as an interconnecting drawing room and 10-seater dining room. It is here in the sitting room that Jack Worthing proposes to Gwendolen Fairfax in Wilde’s play.
The three main bedrooms, which each occupy a floor of their own, have private dressing rooms and ensuite bathrooms. In the principal suite, this includes a freestanding sculptural bathtub and a double walk-in shower with Armani marble.
The property also features a cinema room, gym, steam room, storage vault and terraces on the first and fourth floors.
True to its description in The Importance of Being Earnest, the property is luxuriously furnished, having been refurbished and modernised by its owners.
“In the luxurious rooms of this magnificent historic yet fully modernised Mayfair townhouse, Wilde’s play comes to life and you can imagine Algernon Moncrieff, Jack, Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell being quite at home,” says Jeremy Gee, managing director of Beauchamp Estates.
“With its links to Oscar Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest, this is one of the most famous townhouses in Mayfair and we anticipate interest in this property from discerning buyers from around the world.”
