Elthams Tudor-deco party palace reveals bunker bar and long-lost paintings

The inside of Eltham Palace, built in 1936 for members of the Courtauld family. Photograph: Alamy

In the late 15th century, when it was home to a boy who would become Henry VIII, and again in the 1930s, when it became an art-deco party house for the textile millionaire Stephen Courtauld and his wife, Virginia, Christmas was a hectic time at Eltham Palace, as it filled with holly and ivy, candles and firelight, the kitchens working flat out and the great hall filling with guests.

At first glance the great hall so familiar to Henry, who enjoyed many childhood celebrations at Eltham, looks miraculously unchanged under its great hammerbeam roof, the third largest in England, built for Edward IV in the 1470s. But the historian Andrew Hann stoops and pats the stone flagged floor to reveal one of the innovations introduced by Courtauld when he took on the property in the 30s. On a cold winter evening, the slabs are not as icy as expected: this is a medieval hall with underfloor heating.

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Weve learned a great deal about life in this house from people who visited or worked here, and were trying to put back some of that history, Hann says, of the 1.7m that English Heritage has put forward for a conservation project at Eltham Palace, the first since it took over the property in 1995.

The plan is to open previously unseenparts of what must rank as one of its most eccentric properties: a state-of-the-art 1930s mansion attached to a 15th-century hall, surrounded by a Tudor moat, deep in suburban southeast London.

When Henry VIII became king in 1509 he found his waterfront palace at Greenwich more convenient and Eltham fell into decline. It was used as a barn in the 18th century, and by the early 20th century it was an indoor tennis court. In 1933 Courtauld brother of Samuel, who founded the Courtauld Institute controversially gained permission to build a new house in the grounds provided he restored Elthams medieval hall.

John Seely and Paul Paget were an unusual choice of architects. They had excellent society connections, as heir to a title and son of a bishop respectively, and after the second world war they became known for sensitive restoration work on bombed churches. However, in 1933 their firm was only six years old, and Eltham was their first major project.

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Elthams Tudor-deco party palace reveals bunker bar and long-lost paintings