If these two Chelsea houses seem to presage an early return to the serenity of Georgian street architecture, Shaw’s J. P. Heseltine house of 1875 at 196 Queen’s Gate in South Kensington unleashed a flood of the most individualistic house-design London had ever seen. Stucco-fronted houses of builders’ Renaissance design were still being erected on contiguous sites when this tall gabled façade rose, totally oblivious of old and new neighbours. Cut brick, moulded brick, terracotta, all of the brightest red, surround very large mullioned windows in a composition that is gratuitously asymmetrical at the base but symmetrical in the upper storeys below the crowning gable. For fifteen years such houses proliferated in the Chelsea, Kensington, and Earls Court districts of western London. The best are by Shaw himself, such as those at 68, 62, and 72 Cadogan Square—the first of 1879, the others of 1882—and those at 8-11 and 15 Chelsea Embankment of 1878-9; but more are by other architects, and the vast majority by builders. In the Chelsea Embankment range River House at No. 3 is by Bodley; Nos 4-6 are by Godwin; and No. 7 is by R. Phéné Spiers (1838-1916), an architect whose Parisian training did not restrain him from following Shaw. Collingham Gardens of 1881-7 by Sir Ernest George (1839-1922) and his then partner Harold A. Peto (?-1890), a sort of square with variously designed houses, all gabled, opening on to a lawn in the centre, provides a still more complete illustration of what may be called Neo-Picturesque urbanism. Not at all Shavian, the detailing of many of these houses is very similar to that of Cuijpers’s Rijksmuseum and none of it Queen Anne. The contiguous mansions that George & Peto built in 1882 near by in Harrington Gardens, one for W. S. Gilbert at No. 19 (Plate 104B), the other for Sir Ernest Cassel, the banker, are the most elaborate single London examples of their domestic work. The house of the composer of the Savoy Operas approaches very closely the German Meistersinger mode of the period, but the touch is much lighter—intentionally whimsical perhaps?—and both the organization of the whole and the execution of the profuse detail is very superior to what one finds in most contemporary German work (see Chapter 9).