Montagu House, Whitehall

He built himself a relatively modest mansion in the conventional style of the day, which can be seen in Canaletto's painting of Whitehall.

[1] In the late 1850s, the 2nd Duke of Montagu's descendant, Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch, one of the United Kingdom's three or four richest landowners, replaced the Georgian house with one of the grandest private mansions in London.

It was designed by the versatile Scottish architect William Burn in the style of a French Renaissance chateau.

The interior featured a top-lit central saloon and a grand staircase, heavily coffered ceilings and elaborately carved furnishings.

The site forms roughly the southern half of that of the current main Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall.

Montagu House is the seven-bay house at left with a pediment in this view of the Thames painted by Samuel Scott in 1750.
The Victorian Montagu House. Wood-engraving from the Illustrated London News (1864).
Montagu House at right, in Canaletto 's Whitehall, looking North , viewed from Richmond House, painted after 1747. At far right is part of the stables of Richmond House; left: Holbein Gate of the Palace of Whitehall ; centre: the Privy Garden and the Banqueting House