A "glorious"[1] example of Neo-Palladian architecture in west London, the house was designed and built by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694–1753), and completed in 1729.

His wife, Georgiana Spencer, a prominent and controversial figure in fashion and politics whom he married in 1774, used the house as a retreat and as a Whig stronghold for many years; it was where Charles James Fox died in 1806.

[3] It is dated c. 1610 in a late 17th-century engraving of the Chiswick House estate by Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff,[4] and was constructed with four sides around an open courtyard.

[11][12] He had not closely inspected Roman ruins or made detailed drawings on the sites in Italy; he relied on Palladio and Scamozzi as his interpreters of the classic tradition.

According to Howard Colvin, "Burlington's mission was to reinstate in Augustan England the canons of Roman architecture as described by Vitruvius, exemplified by its surviving remains, and practised by Palladio, Scamozzi and Jones.

[18] After Burlington's death in 1753,[19] his wife, Lady Dorothy Savile, and daughter, Charlotte, who had married William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire in 1748,[20] inherited the house.

In 1774, William married Lady Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire,[24] who enjoyed spending time at Chiswick which she referred to as her "earthly paradise".

[27][28] In 1788 the Cavendish family demolished the Jacobean house and hired architect John White to add two wings to the villa to increase the amount of accommodation.

[31] Between 1862 and 1892 the villa was rented by the Cavendish family to a number of successive tenants, including the Duchess of Sutherland in 1867,[32] the Prince of Wales in the 1870s,[33] and John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, patron of the architect William Burges, from 1881 to 1892.

[37] The 9th Duke of Devonshire sold Chiswick House to Middlesex County Council in 1929,[38] the purchase price being met in part by contributions from public subscribers, including King George V.[35] The villa became a fire station during World War II,[39] and suffered damage; vibration from the bombing of Chiswick brought down the plasterwork in the Upper Tribunal, and on 8 September 1944 a V-2 rocket damaged one of the two wings.

[55] The inset door, projecting plinth and 'v'-necked rusticated vermiculation (resembling tufa) were all derived from the base of Trajan's Column.

[61] From the 1720s, Burlington and Kent experimented with new designs, incorporating elements such as a Ha-ha, classical garden buildings, statues, groves, faux Egyptian objects, bowling greens, winding walks, cascades and water features.

The lawn at the rear of the house was created by 1745 and planted with young Cedar of Lebanon trees which alternate with stone funerary urns designed by William Kent.

The excess soil was heaped up behind William Kent's cascade to produce an elevated walkway for people to admire the gardens and a view of the nearby River Thames.

A gateway designed by Inigo Jones in 1621 at Beaufort House in Chelsea (home of Sir Hans Sloane) was bought and removed by Lord Burlington and rebuilt in the gardens at Chiswick in 1738.

[65] Chiswick House has been linked with Freemasonry,[66] and is believed by some scholars to have functioned as a private Masonic Lodge or Temple (unaffiliated to Grand Lodge), given that many of the ceiling paintings by William Kent in the Gallery and the Red, Blue and Summer Parlour Rooms contain iconography of a strong Masonic, Hermetic, and possible Jacobite character.

Pat Rogers has argued (following the original research of Jane Clark) that Chiswick House was a symbolic temple, based on so-called Royal Arch Freemasonry, involving a Hermetic intervention designed to heal the sufferings of the exiled Jews.

[66] Lord Burlington's handwritten list of titles in his library at Chiswick also shows that he supported a large number of publications by Freemasons.

These included leading figures of the European 'Enlightenment' including the philosophers Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778); the future US Presidents John Adams (1735–1826) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826); Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790); the German landscape artist Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau; the Italian statesman Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882); Russian Tsars Nicholas I (1796–1855) and Alexander I (1777–1825); the shah of Persia; Queen Victoria[73] (1819–1901) and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg[73] (1819–61); Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832); Prince Leopold III, Duke of Anhalt-Dessau (1740–1817); Prime Ministers William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) and Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745); Queen Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1683–1737); John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713–92) and the architect William Burges (1827–1881).

On 20 May 1966, the Beatles visited Chiswick House to shoot promotional films for both sides of their latest 45 RPM single, "Paperback Writer" and "Rain".