Richard D'Oyly Carte's idyllic Thames island hideaway
One hundred and thirty years after Richard D’Oyly Carte, the Victorian talent agent who brought together Gilbert and Sullivan and built the Savoy Hotel on the profits, failed to get a hospitality license for his beloved two-acre private Thames island at Weybridge, its new owners have opened a café, creperie and wine bar on the island, giving visitors a unique peek at the 13-bedroom mansion and its stunning riverside grounds.
The opening of D'Oyly's, headed by Benedict Phillips of Cafe Benedict in Teddington, marks the closing of a historic circle.
Despite owning several of London’s premier hotels and eateries, including The Savoy, Claridge’s, The Connaught and Simpsons, D’Oyly was refused an alcohol license for his planned boutique hotel on the Thames.
Ever the entrepreneur, he moved into the house, installed a ballroom and a pet crocodile, and the home became a private musical salon for the rich, famous and talented.
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New owners of the island, Andy and Sheila Hill, who are restoring the derelict and vandalised property that was left empty for 12 years, underwent a rigorous public hearing to win council permission to turn the east end of the island, formerly used as a boatyard, into an 80-seater café.
Open 10am-8pm, the cafe serves sweet and savoury crepes and a wide range of drinks and cocktails.
“It was a nerve-racking experience knowing the history. It felt like Richard D’Oyly Carte’s unfinished business and to fail would somehow let him down,” says music tech pioneer Andy Hill.
Gilbert and Sullivan regularly rehearsed with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company on the island – often with locals listening in from the banks.
Andy Hill hopes the home will once again become a music venue by inviting major contemporary artists – musicians like Adele, Ed Sheeran and Joan Armatrading – to stage intimate concerts in the ballroom, which will then be live-streamed to fans around the world.
This summer, the Hills marked the first stage of the refurbishment by inviting the Gilbert & Sullivan Society to a G&S operatic in the ballroom, with music played on Sullivan's own grand piano.
Richard Nye meets the buyer breathing new life into the house of Savoy.
Mid-afternoon and the ghosts are singing in the sunshine.
Pirates, fresh in from Penzance, moored up beside the lawn; three little maids just back from school; a tom-tit singing soulfully in his riverside tree. D’Oyly Carte Island, once owned by the man who brought the world Gilbert and Sullivan, is awakening from a long, morbid sleep.
Welcome to Titipu-on-Thames
And here, strolling across the gated pedestrian bridge to meet me, is the new Lord High Everything: Andy Hill, redeemer and restorer of this verdant isle – plonked down in midstream between Shepperton and Weybridge – and its exuberant, idiosyncratic mansion, Eyot House.
For years the place lay empty, cobwebs and vandals dividing the spoils. The future looked as grim as November. And then, one day in 2019, Andy came floating past.
“I was out on the river with my wife, practicing for a charity kayak,” he explains, as we navigate our way to the ballroom through the shoals of renovation work.
“When we reached here and saw the house, I know nothing about it whatsoever. I had no idea who D’Oyly Carte was or anything. Sheila, who is a designer, thought it was fabulous. I just thought it looked incredibly sad.”
Already an astute talent agent – widely styled now as the Victorian Simon Cowell – Richard D’Oyly Carte struck his purest gold in 1875, bringing together librettist William Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan to collaborate on Trial by Jury, the first of what would prove to be a long and enduring series of witty and intelligent comic operas.
Patience, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard: at the Savoy Theatre, D’Oyly Carte’s new London venue on the Strand – the first public building lit entirely by electric – the Gilbert and Sullivan brand went through the Renaissance roof.
“Back then there wasn’t anything like it,” says Andy, his former ignorance of the subject now long since dissolved. “It was either really serious opera or beer music on the piano. D’Oyly Carte was determined to bridge the gap.”
Soon he was branching out into luxury hotels. The Savoy, his first, opened in 1889, and it was this that inspired his acquisition of the island. Why not build a country annexe here, he mused, and ferry his well-heeled celebrity guests upstream?
Unfortunately, the local magistrates were less enthused and refused to grant an alcohol licence.
But D’Oyly Carte bought the island anyway, bestowed his name upon it and constructed a private dwelling instead: Eyot House, a rambling 13-bedroom affair reminiscent of a vast Swiss chalet, complete with Tudor-style chimneys that would not have disgraced Hampton Court.
And the great and the good still came. Here in the ballroom, soon to recover its lost glory, Gilbert and Sullivan would rehearse with D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, while locals listened in from the Weybridge bank. JM Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, was another frequent guest.
As for the outdoors, Carte had the spacious gardens laid out with a pond, brought in a pet crocodile (why wouldn’t you?) and ringed the island with tall, secluding trees courtesy of the experts at Kew.
“Apparently the crocodile escaped, but come see this,” laughs Andy, escorting me upstairs and out onto the balcony. “There, look – up in the eaves. D’Oyly Carte has had a wooden crocodile carved there, presumably in memory. He could be quite wacky.”
There are striking parallels between the first and latest owners of Eyot House. Like Carte, Andy Hill is an innovator; and like Carte, he emerged from the pack as a hugely effective conduit of other people’s music.
D’Oyly Carte united Gilbert with Sullivan and provided their genius with a stage. Andy Hill – a Richmond man for more than 50 years before coming here – used his IT background to deliver the world’s first online music service, M.A.R.S.
And the two men share a further characteristic: the uncanny knack of making the right move at the right time.
Having formed his own tech company to build on his breakthrough, Andy sold it off in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom. Eighteen months later, at a much-deflated sum, he bought it back.
“People say it was genius, but I can honestly tell you that it was just pure good fortune. I’ve always been lucky,” he admits. “But I do believe that there is a comparison with D’Oyly Carte, in that he brought high-quality music to the people. I like to think I did something similar through technology.”
Fortunately for posterity, when it came to the purchase of D’Oyly Carte Island, Andy’s perennial luck held.
By the time he first paddled past, Eyot House was in terminal decline, weathered and warped by the neglect of an abusive Chinese owner who had finally decided to sell up. A wealthy Russian had put in an offer. Then came Covid; the prospective buyer feared a property slump; the Sino-Russian deal collapsed.
“By then I knew all about the island, and I’d told the agent that I was interested, but I needed another viewing to make sure. When I got over here, I found a squatter called Midge who described himself as “the caretaker”. He gave me a tour and evidently knew the whole story. Later, after we’d bought the place [for just over £3m] and moved in, he moored his boat round the back and ended up by helping out in the garden.”
And so began, for the house and island, the long road back to health. If vision and vigour were sufficient cause, the work would be complete already. For Andy Hill is no ordinary homebuyer: he is, by self-appointment, a fiercely protective guardian of history.
Everything he does here, from the restoration of the fabric to planning for future events, dances merrily to the tune of D’Oyly Carte.
There are fairy lights on the balcony because the term was first coined at the Savoy Theatre, inspired by the lights worn by fairies in the 1882 hit Iolanthe.
The ballroom is home to a grand piano once purchased by Sullivan himself – gifted by a man who once ran the largest permanent display of G&S memorabilia in the world. This summer, the Gilbert and Sullivan society were invited to hear it in its stately new home, through a production of a G&S opera.
“I wanted to build on that by staging intimate concerts in the ballroom with top contemporary artists – people like Adele, Ed Sheeran and Joan Armatrading. You’d get about 50 people in there, so it would just be for their friends and family, but we’d pay for it all by streaming it and charging via pay-per-view. It’s what Carte would have done.”
But the most significant new development has been the opening this summer of a cafe and creperie in the former boatyard site.
“If a greenhouse can become Petersham Nurseries, just think what a boathouse with these views could be!"
“You know, every time I walk over that bridge to the mainland, someone stops me to say how pleased they are that something is finally happening with this beautiful house. Yes, it’s a lot of work, and it’s going to cost me another million to restore the whole place, but it’s when you really commit to a project that things get done. I love a challenge. I just want to get this right.”
From a theatre downstream comes the thunderous sound of applause.
Comments (5)
Comment FeedD'Oyly Carte renovation
Steve Waters 80 days ago
Wonderful D’Oyly Carte Island Restoration
Maureen Littleboy 223 days ago
Great to see the island coming to life
Steve Z 260 days ago
D’Oyly Carte Island
Lesley Stapley 275 days ago
D’Oyly cart
Pat lake 295 days ago