Walking along Weymouth Street the other week, a number of houses caught my eye, not least this one which in spite of visual obstructions such as cars revealed itself as cramming a lot of architectural incident into a relatively small expanse of facade. It’s a house of 1908 in that style, or rather amalgamation of styles known as ‘Queen Anne’. ‘Queen Anne’ has very little to do with Queen Anne. It brings together a mix of stylistic influences – a bit of Dutch, some Christopher Wren, a hint of Renaissance – that its historian, Mark Girouard, described as ‘a kind of architectural cocktail’. Architects added to the mixture features such as red brick, white-painted woodwork, fancy gables, oriel windows, and steep roofs to produce an impression that, to the Victorians of the 1870s onwards, represented a breath of fresh air after the stuffiness of the Gothic revival on the one hand and 19th-century classicism on the other.
This house in Weymouth Street exhibits many of the typical Queen Anne features, plus a few more that are equally decorative: circular windows, a dormer with a curvy pediment above it, and big ‘look-at-me’ swags in those eye-catching gables. It’s the work of F. M. Elgood, who built (or added new facades to) many houses in the Marylebone area. He was surveyor to two of the big landowners in this district, the Howard de Walden Estate and the Hop[e-Edwards Estate. This house was built for the former. By the time it was on Elgood’s drawing board, Queen Anne was widespread, influencing the design of even such downmarket buildings pubs. Perhaps for a large town house like this, both architect and client felt that there was a need for some extra bells and whistles, hence those elaborate swags. A heady cocktail indeed. Cheers!
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