A stroll through the gallery and couture retail area around New Bond Street throws up various architectural delights. Here’s just one example spotted on a London visit the other day, sticking out elegantly and self-consciously between a couple of more sober buildings. A neat group of stone-mullioned windows is caught between a large flattened arch that embraces both ground and first floors and a curvy gable that stands out between the flat-topped structures on either side. There’s also quite a bit of carved ornament – looping vines and tendrils, bunches of grapes and so on, all done in creamy Bath stone.
One of the curious things about this sort of building of the early years of the 20th century is that architectural historians find it difficult to put a precise stylistic label to it. Pevsner* goes for ‘free Jacobean’, taking his cue from the mullioned windows and the gable; the listing text describes it as ‘free late Gothic’, perhaps reflecting the double-curving ogee shape of the big arch. The common element in these two descriptions is ‘free’. This was a moment in architecture around 1900–1910 when architects (here Treadwell & Martin) broke away from the Victorian fashion for reviving past styles (aiming in many cases for a kind of ideal version of the past), going instead for something more original. So I see elements of Art Nouveau here alongside the Jacobean windows, in the ornament, in the tall, narrow gable, and in the double curve of the ogee arch, especially the way in which at its top it merges with the flowing ornamental vines. The number in the apex of the arch is also done in an elongated and curvy style that’s typical of Art Nouveau.
There’s something unbuttoned and celebratory about this building, which does things differently from its more straight-laced neighbours – Pevsner catches this feeling in his account of the building on the corner, which represents a ’sobering up after the Edwardian party’. That’s right, and the plain frontage to the left allows its elegant neighbour to shine.
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* By Pevsner here, I mean the revised volume in the Buildings of England series, London 6: Westminster, by Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner.
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