Tart Hall

The Countess of Arundel's share of the Shrewsbury inheritance enabled her to buy the site and extend or rebuild Tart Hall in 1638 as a pleasure house and laboratory, with its appearance based on an Italian casino (that is, a villa or summerhouse).

She took advice on the construction from George Gage and employed the master mason Nicholas Stone,[2] and the building appears to have been influenced by Serlio and the villas of north Italy.

The newly married couple lived at Tart House while in London: their first child was born there in April 1643, and later that year Hollar engraved the hall in the background of a print Spring, the first in a series of the allegorical four seasons.

The background features in the other three prints are also connected with the Arundels, with a view from Tart Hall across St James's Park to the Banqueting House in Summer, the grotto at Aldbury in Autumn, and the Royal Exchange in Winter.

[4] From the evidence, Tart Hall appears to have been a three-story building with Dutch gables and attic, with large glazed windows at the front, and two loggia wings extending into the garden at the rear.

In his "Morning's Walk from London to Kew" (1817), Sir Richard Phillips writes: "At Pimlico, the name of Stafford-Row reminded me of the ancient distinction of Tart-Hall, once the rival in size and splendour of its more fortunate neighbour, Buckingham-House, and long the depository of the Arundelian Tablets and Statues.