during World War II. Ethos During the 18th century forms of entertainment began to change and large receptions came into fashion, often taking the form of concerts and balls. Initially, hosts hired one of the many new assembly rooms built to indulge the fashion. It was not long before the more dedicated and wealthy hosts began to add a ballroom to their town houses; the more wealthy still forsook their old-fashionedly proportioned town houses in favour of new and vast palaces designed purely for entertaining. The Duke of Devonshire, an owner of vast estates in Derbyshire and elsewhere, belonged to the latter category. Thus the fire at Devonshire House in 1733 provided the unforeseen opportunity to build one such palace during the height of the fashion. The 3rd Duke chose the fashionable architect William Kent, for whom this was a first commission for a London house. It was built between 1734 and about 1740. Kent was the protégé of the immensely cultivated 3rd Earl of Burlington and had worked on his Chiswick House, built in 1729, and also at Holkham Hall, completed circa 1741, both in the Palladian style and considered the epitome of fashion and sophistication. Chiswick House later came, with other estates, into the possession of the Dukes of Devonshire through the marriage of the 4th Duke to Lady Charlotte Boyle, daughter and heiress of Lord Burlington. Architecture In typical Palladian style, Devonshire House consisted of a corps de logis flanked by service wings. The severity of the design - three storeys in eleven bays - caused one contemporary critic to liken the mansion to a warehouse, and a modern biographer of Kent to remark on its "plain severity". However, the curiously flat exterior concealed Kent's sumptuous interiors which housed a large part of the Devonshire art collection, considered one of the finest in the United Kingdom, and a renowned library, housed in a room 40 ft long and including amongst its treasures Claude Lorraine's Liber Veritatis, his record in sketches of a lifetime of painting. In the Duke's sitting room a glass case over the chimneypiece contained the best of his collection of engraved gems and Renaissance and Baroque medallions. Such a prominent commission could hardly fail to be included in Vitruvius Britannicus. The plan of Devonshire House defines it as one of the earliest of the great 18th-century town houses, then designed identically to grand country