M8| Friday, March 20, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
If Walls
Could Talk
a reward for his work, he was
given casts of the sculptures. He
built a new hall in Stanley House
in 1812 to display them.
Records held by Kensington
and Chelsea Council record that in
1840, the Stanley House was sold
to the College of St. Mark and St.
John, a teacher-training college,
which used it for accommodations
and teaching space. It remained in
institutional use for more than
150 years.
Its next, and current, owners
are Natasha and Konstantin Ka-
galovsky. Russian by birth, the
couple moved to New York and
then, in 1996, to London, where
they had their son, Philip, now 22.
Initially, the couple rented an
apartment in the upscale Kensing-
ton neighborhood. After six years,
however, Mrs. Kagalovsky, 65, a
former executive at the Bank of
New York, said they were both
ready to put down more perma-
nent roots. “We thought that
since we would be staying in Lon-
don for a while it would be nice
to have something of our own,”
she said.
She said they initially viewed
apartments. “We had never lived
in a house, they have roofs and
basements...trouble,” said Mrs.
Kagalovsky. “But when we could
not find anything we liked we
went into houses.”
When they first saw Stanley
House, it was far from perfect. “It
had been empty for a long time,”
said Mrs. Kagalovsky. “There were
no bathrooms, no proper plumb-
ing, these huge holes in the
floor—we still do not know why.
It was dilapidated, but not com-
pletely ruined.”
What it did have, she said, was
great lateral space. “I do not like
typical English houses which have
one room on each floor, which isContinued from page M1The upstairs hallway at Stanley House, below, features
a hand-painted doorway. The front facade of the
building, right. The decor, by designer Nicky Haslam,
features antiques and a variety of textures.
MANSION
in her 2009 book “Wedlock: The True
Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Re-
markable Divorce of Mary Eleanor
Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.”
He preferred to spend his time at the
castle, the setting for William Shake-
speare’s Macbeth, while the countess re-
mained in London.She whiled away her
time with a series of lovers and chroni-
cled her affairs in diaries that are now
held in the British Library. The earl died
in 1776 of tuberculosis when the count-
ess was just 27.
A year later, she married her second
husband, an Irish-born soldier and adven-
turer named Andrew Robinson Stoney. He
was heavily in debt. He tricked her into
marriage by pretending to have been in-
jured during a duel with the editor of the
Morning Post, a newspaper that had pub-
lished scurrilous articles about her. In real-
ity, he had written the articles himself and
the duel was a sham. He pretended to be
mortally wounded in defense of her honor
and persuaded the countess to grant his
dying wish—that she marry him.
The match was doomed from the
start. According to historian Ralph Ar-
nold’s biography, “The Unhappy Countess,”
written in 1957, Mr. Stoney was violent,
unfaithful, and eager to gain control of his
wife’s fortune. In 1785, their divorce pro-
ceedings laid bare the fraught details of
the union, making the countess the talk
of London. By 1792, she had retired to the
countryside with two of her daughters.
She died in 1800, at the age of 51. She
was laid to rest at Westminster Abbey,
and was buried, according to Abbey re-
cords, in a “superb” wedding dress.Mary Eleanor Bowes was born in 1749,
the only child of George and Mary
Bowes. George Bowes had made his for-
tune in coal mining and when he died in
1760, his 11-year-old daughter inherited
land plus a fortune of around $1.21 mil-
lion, according to the Sunniside & District
Local History Society.
On her 18th birthday, Mary Eleanor
married the Earl of Strathmore. The cou-
ple had five children but the union wasn’t
happy. The earl, whose portrait still
hangs in Glamis Castle, his Scottish
home, was a handsome man, but he
wasn’t a good husband, according to
Wendy Moore, a journalist and historian,THE UNFORTUNATE COUNTESS
NatashaKagalovskyandher
sonPhilipinthehall.Thestaircaseisareplicaofthe
original,whichwastoobadly
damagedtobesalvaged.Heavywoodenpanelingin
thediningroomhasbeen
paintedalightershade.VANESSA BERBERIAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (7); MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/EVERETT COLLECTION (COUNTESS)ThemasterbedroomThekitchen,featuringa
hand-paintedcabinet,left.