Photo Essay: Britain’s finest Art Deco buildings
Originating at the dawn of the 20th century in Vienna and Paris, Art Deco soon spread to the rest of Europe, setting off the public imagination with an expressive amalgam of influences that ranged from American classicism and cubism to Oriental motifs. In this Photo Essay, we present highlights from a new work by architectural historian Elain Harwood, Art Deco Britain: Buildings of the Interwar Years, published in association with The Twentieth Century Society, which documents how the style took shape in the UK.
Eltham Palace, London SE9
Eltham Palace is a romantic hideaway, accessible only across a medieval bridge and moat. Formerly Edward IV’s 15th-century great hall, the palace was acquired by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld, who combined its remains with their new house, offering romantic interpretations of the Swedish and Italian aesthetics influential at the time. Two wings are linked by a near-circular entrance hall with Australian blackbean panelling, where a geometric rug and white leather furniture were recreated in 1999 by English Heritage.
The painted ceiling beams in the drawing-room reflect traditional Swedish designs. More sophisticated is Peter Malacrida’s dining room, with aluminium and black marble decoration featured in a Greek key and fluted surround to the electric fire, and black and silver lacquer doors. Most luxurious are the private bathrooms, Virginia’s with marble panels and gold-plated taps set in a gold mosaic niche below a bust of the goddess Psyche. All this luxury was little used; the Courtaulds travelled extensively before the Second World War, and emigrated in 1944.
San Remo Towers, Bournemouth, Dorset
A brochure in 1940 described San Remo Towers as ‘a magnificent block of 164 superior flats, £96–260 per annum rental’. The deal included central hot water and heating, a telephone service and ‘auto vac’ cleaning system, a resident manager, porter, daily maid, boot cleaning and window cleaning services. There was a residents’ club with a reading room, card room, billiard room and library, and children’s recreation and games rooms. Kiosks in the entrance lobbies sold convenience items like tobacco and took orders for the local tradespeople, while the fifth-floor restaurant offered à la carte meals for 38s a week, or simpler dinners at 2s/6d each. Hector O. Hamilton, the architect, had worked in America, so understood planning for such services and included a grand underground car park accommodating 130 vehicles, all unusually ambitious for the Guildford developers Armstrong Estates.
Hamilton’s long-term residence in America, perhaps, also determined the building’s Spanish Mission style. The flats are set in five blocks, five storeys high, each finished with white render, patterned brickwork and pantile roofs, with coloured faience to the topmost windows and balconies, and to the entrance doors, each set between barley-sugar columns.
St Olaf House, London SE1
Started as a classical design project, St Olaf House was stripped back by the architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel to express the open ground-floor (required for car parking), the sloping windows of a rooftop drawing office and the luxury of the boardroom and directors’ common room that dominate the river frontage.
The windows were originally gilded and are angled to give the best views and, rather functionally, to be able to open away from the prevailing wind. But what really impresses is the quality of decoration throughout the building, including staircase balustrades, granolithic floor patterns and the lift doors. The double-height boardroom has pilasters and coffered beams in grey scagliola, while the common room is panelled with veneered hardwoods. Goodhart-Rendel even designed the furniture, made by Betty Joel, which survived into the 1980s.
E. Pellicci’s Café, London E2
Bolotonno Fabrizi acquired a confectioners’ shop here in 1908, and passed it to the Pellicci family in 1915. Mrs Elide Pellicci turned it into a café in 1939, but the new facade of lemon yellow Vitrolite and a claustrophobically small yet jazzy interior – its walls featuring cocktail shaker-shapes in panels of contrasting marquetry – are said by her family to date only from 1946.
The years immediately after the Second World War were the heyday of the Italian café, particularly in London, where they offered a way of stretching limited rations (controls continued until 1954). The tiny café, now run by Elide’s son Nevio, is encrusted with many generations of family photos and international awards.
Wolverton, Silver End, Essex
Initially designed for factories, metal windows found extensive use in domestic contexts when a timber shortage during the 1920s meant alternatives had to be found. Metal window business owner Francis Crittall built a model village that showcased his product, where Wolverton house served one of the managers of Crittall’s factory, and was later beautifully restored by the current owners. Built of rendered brick, its central staircase window in an otherwise blind upper floor is reminiscent of Peter Behrens’s New Ways, Northampton (1925), acknowledged as Britain’s first Modern Movement house, but its door and the balcony feature a ‘flying V’ motif that is quintessential Art Deco.
The Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, Wales
This strikingly modern hall with golden panelled ceiling was named after the producer of the artwork adorning its walls. Commissioned by Lord Iveagh of the House of Lords in 1924, Frank Brangwyn, a muralist and war artist, he produced a set of decorative fantasies depicting ‘various Dominions and parts of the British Empire’, an unusually humane interpretation based on extensive travels and studies at London Zoo. Although originally criticised by the commissioner for the radiant colour that was being revived during the epoch of Art Deco, Brangwyn’s painted panels were met with acclaim and found a new civic home in Swansea in the mid-1930s. Like other public interiors in the Guildhall complex, The Brangwyn Hall remains remarkably intact, serving as a statement of civic grandeur.
Art Deco Britain by Elain Harwood is published by Batsford in collaboration with Twentieth Century Society. Photographs by Elain Harwood.
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