Havana 's hurrah - The world's building styles are all applauded in Havana , as illustrated by an ambassador's capricious home in Vedado. Juliet Barclay pays a visit.

Photography by Jorge Gavilondo

The residence of the British ambassador to Havana is simultaneously impressive and welcoming, a fortunate combination in a house so frequently used for business, political and diplomatic entertaining. Commissioned in 1917 from the well-known architect Leonardo Morales by the sugar baron Pablo Mendoza, it is mainly Neoclassical in style, with a dash of “Havana Eclecticism.''

Whilst this is a term rather too frequently used by Cuban architectural historians striving to explain the luxuriant eccentricities of Havana's architecture to bewildered visitors, it is in fact an accurate description; many of the buildings outside the Historical Centre are capricious combinations of a wide variety of building styles and decorative detail. From Neo-Baroque to Neoclassical, Art Nouveau to Art Deco, Hollywood Hacienda to Modernist, there are few early twentieth- century building styles not represented in Havana , and local architects often combined several of them within one building in a merry extravaganza of decorative confusion.

Even where they might themselves have been inclined towards a more conservative approach, the designers were overruled by their clients. Havana's richer residents liked to pick and choose decorative detail at whim, so that in a number of mansions in Vedado, which used to be one of the most exclusive residential areas of Havana, one feels as likely to come across Scarlett O'Hara pouting on an Antebellum porch as Josephine Baker dancing a jitterbug in a Jazz Age drawing room.

 Entering the British residence through substantial wrought iron gates, one circles a cherub-encrusted fountain and passes through the stately porch to an elegant but welcoming hall paved with Italian marble. Whilst queuing to sign the book, one contemplates the swooping curl of the marble staircase, the ornate, vaguely Byzantine furniture and the rippling layers of reflections in the silvery looking glass. On sweltering summer nights, guests are given cold mojitos and shown straight onto the terrace which overlooks two sides of the garden. There, concealed lighting shines on a long lawn, neoclassical statuary and a curved bench in a bower of magenta bougainvillea. On cooler winter evenings, people gather in the double drawing room to talk, consume delicious canap s and admire the ambassador's drawings. John Dew is an accomplished artist who has amassed a large collection of pen and ink impressions of his travels; his wife Marion is a talented (if reticent) musician and has brought her harpsichord with her to Havana .

One of the most satisfying aspects of their house is the skilful interconnection, both visual and practical, of its ground floor spaces. From the hall, one is gently propelled through to the reception rooms by the general sense of forward movement created by the curved wall, and from the first drawing room one is tempted through to the second by glimpses of its generous space and of the cool, white terrace and glowing garden beyond. Spectacular trees, lush borders, statues, urns, obelisks and columns can be seen from the drawing room windows, and the sun bouncing off the pale surfaces of the terrace fills both rooms with a soothing glow of pale golden light. The dining room, cool and formal with a towering pier glass, overlooks the northern side of the garden with its fountain and flowers.

Of all the spaces on the ground floor of the house, perhaps the most agreeable is the terrace, with its view of the lawn and the entrance of an as yet undeveloped walled area upon which the ambassador has his eye for the layout of a “secret'' garden within a garden; a bosky corner where one might spend secluded hours reading or simply watching the sun glinting through the arching branches of the trees. And on the days when it is too hot to potter in the garden, too hot to read (even in the shade), almost too hot to talk and certainly too hot to think, bliss beckons in the form of the exquisite, if stylistically eccentric, indoor pool, the first to be built in Cuba, designed at the behest of Pablo Mendoza who did not want local lotharios leering through the hibiscus hedges at his nubile daughters. Passing black marble busts of a grizzled Homer and a beautiful, androgynous Sappho, one reaches the shallow mosaic steps leading into the cool depths. At the other end of the pool, a stylised dolphin perpetually spouts a long jet of water – perpetually, because no one has discovered how to turn it off. The dolphin curls up the base of a monolithic slab of marble whose apex rather startlingly resolves itself into a bust of Aphrodite, with noble features and her name in art nouveau lettering below. The goddess looks as though she wouldn't mind a dip in the pool – her expression is resigned rather than delighted, perhaps due to the weight of the bronze flowers on her head, which seem slowly to be pushing her hairdo forward over her face.

The pool is surrounded by tall, frosted glass windows and dark wooden trellises which cast pretty rippling reflections on the surface of the water. White wicker sofas with blue and white cushions, and lots of feathery palms in pots placed in the rounded alcove at the end of the pool, intensify the atmosphere of peace. The silence is broken only by the faint sibilance of the dolphin's waterspout pattering on the surface of the pool. And when the Ambassador is floating gently on his back pondering knotty diplomatic problems, or doing energetic laps of backstroke, he can contemplate the Neo-Mudejar ceiling, with its carved and painted curlicues and stylised floral finials.

Upstairs, the mood changes subtly: less grand, more cosy. Mrs Dew's light, pretty drawing room with its gauzy white curtains has French windows leading onto roof terraces at either end and it is here that the family relaxes, occasionally yelling affectionately at Poppy, the puppy, when she temporarily forgets her newly-learned lavatorial obligations.

A distinctly Frenchified neoclassicism prevails throughout much of the house and garden, occasionally punctuated by touches of Cuban Baroque, Sevillian Mudejar and distant echoes of the Wiener Werkstatt. Wedgwood-style porcelain cameos of frolicking goddesses are set into carved tendrils of laurel and ivy on bookshelves and cupboards on the upper floor, and the motif is repeated in the stained glass window above the stairs and the painted screen which stands between the service area and the hall. There were probably many more of these cameos in evidence when the house was newly furnished and rang regularly with the parrot-house chatter of Havana 's high society, whose gorgeous plumage must have been so elegantly complemented by the soaring height and slightly severe formality of the drawing and dining rooms.

The neoclassical emphasis on discipline, albeit Havana-style, downstairs seems to demand a certain standard of sartorial respect. But one cannot be wafting about all day in empire-line gowns or draping oneself over the furniture like Madame Recamier in the Ingres portrait, so Marion Dew and her daughters retreat with relief to the upper regions where they can make a cup of tea or family meals in a small kitchen and eat them in an adjoining, far less formal dining room, which looks out over the treetops in a westerly direction.

On April 21, at the party given to celebrate the Queen's birthday, John and Marion Dew screened a video of the boat race. A crowd of nostalgic Britons gathered in front of a wide screen and watched with tears prickling their eyes as Oxford beat Cambridge for the third time in four years. When the race was over, though, and the victors were shown celebrating under a relentless grey London drizzle, everyone turned back to their cocktails and conversation with a collective shudder of relief that rather than freezing on the banks of the Thames, we were here in Havana, on a balmy tropical evening, drinking the notoriously powerful Residence mojitos and revelling in the softly-lit elegance of this beautiful house.