Beautiful as a Story
“Architectural fashion is so often a reaction to what went immediately before. There’s even a perceptible difference between the father A W Pugin and the son E W Pugin’s work. The second generation architect’s designs are more rationalised,” believes artist and architectural publisher Anne Davey Orr. “Later, the use of concrete in the 20th century would issue in a much more open expression of materials and structure.”
The penultimate decades of the last two centuries both stuck to something of a “more is more” mantra. A sort of turn of the century syndrome. Eclecticism gone wild. Not without honour and slightly mad. Pont Street for the 1880s and 90s; Postmodernism for the 1980s and 90s. Out went conformity and goodbye to context; in came variety and hello to contrast. It was the ever inventive cartoonist Osbert Lancaster who came up with the name Pont Street Dutch due to the style flourishing in Chelsea. It could easily have been North German Revival, Flemish Revival or New Queen Anne. Or even Hans Town or Cadogan. Sir John Betjeman abbreviated it to Pont Street, making it even more geographically precise. He calls it the “new built red as hard as the morning gaslight” in his poem The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel. These days the SW postcodes are as golden as they are terracotta.
That’s the name explained but who invented the style? Architect John James Stevenson claimed Queen Anne as his creation. The practice Ernest George and Harold Peto produced some of the most overblown examples in Harrington Gardens but really the style was to become synonymous with the dominating work of Norman Shaw. Pont Street rang the death knell, scrawled the writing on the wall, beckoned the banshee for regular terraces, heralding an asymmetric age of individualism. “Look at me, look at me!” screams each house as the rooflines tipsily whoosh and swoosh over more Dutch gables than Keizersgracht. Against the navy canvas of a sun drenched winter’s morning, and to be repeated nine years later on a sun drenched summer’s morning, the red brick dressed with white stone renders Pont Street a patriotic tricolour.
Such strength of character allows 20th century blips such as the picture window spanning the penthouse of 41 Lennox Gardens to be immersed into the wider townscape. The houses celebrate their birthdays: “1884” shouts 25 Lennox Gardens from metre tall letters on its third floor. A few doors up, 43 Lennox Gardens announces to the world it’s a year younger. A wander in wonder along the streets of SW1 and SW3, the blessed boulevards of the Cadogan Estate, throws up a maximalist impure visual feast, an aesthetic eyeful, for the devil and angels are in the detail.
At a glance, here are some of the hyperactive highlights. Keyhold silhouette broken pediment copper domes in Sloane Gardens. Double decker dormers in Culford Gardens. Witch’s hat copper turrets where Draycott Place meets Blacklands Terrace. Quoined porthole windows peering out of 54 to 58 Draycott Place. A neo Elizabethan fretwork loggia hugging 3 Cadogan Gardens. Pierless Brighton balconies clinging onto 85 to 87 Cadogan Gardens. A château mansard atop 89 Cadogan Gardens. Twin Queen Anne fanlights surmounting the doorcase of 105 Cadogan Gardens. Stumpy Ionic pilasters holding up egg and dart capitals framing the porch of 60 Cadogan Square. A pair of ballsy busty bulbous oriel windows on the side elevation of 63 Cadogan Square. And that’s just at a glance.
Pont Street the address bisects Cadogan Place Gardens under the watchful eyes of the 18 storeyed 1961 Jumeirah Carlton Tower. But the great swathe of red is mostly found between Sloane Street and Lennox Gardens. The extremities of Pont Street dive back into stuccoland. A morning of architectural investigation must be balanced by an afternoon of gourmet indulgence. Historically, afternoon tea was the outcome of dinner slipping to beyond 7pm by the opening years of the 19th century. Hiccupping ladies at first surreptitiously downed tea and gobbled cake in their boudoirs after midday. By 1842, trailblazing trendsetting taboo busting gal about castle Anna Maria Russell, 7th Duchess of Bedford, was bolshily dispensing tea in her sitting room to fill the gap created by the evening meal becoming later and later thanks to gaslighting. Fast forward to the Pont Street era and both sexes were merrily letting rip into cucumber sandwiches and scones with clotted cream in the drawing room or on the lawn. Where better then to indulge than 11 Cadogan Gardens, the hotel launched by the eponymous Estate in 2012? A Darjeeling fuelled calorific high awaits: Carrot Cake Explosion; Chocolate Fudge Bar; Lemon Drizzle Loaf; Macarons; Raspberry Orange Battenburg.
The first part of the hotel’s name is mildly misleading: the reception rooms and 54 bedrooms are spread across four townhouses (“5, 7, 9 and 11 Cadogan Gardens” being something of a mouthful). Bright red brick with white trimmings, in some places to stripy effect (more bands than a 12th of July march); terracotta tracery and scrolls; rusticated Doric columns and shortened Ionic columns; rectangular metal balconies and semicircular brick balconies; windows of every frame and shape and type (more casements than a West Belfast cemetery; and again more sashes than a 12th of July march) and orientation (more than a Pride march in London); oriels, chamfered bays and rectangular bays; flat, round arched and segmental arched windows; mini, Dutch and swan neck gables; 11 Cadogan Gardens is as dynamic Pont Street as it gets. The last part of the hotel’s name is wildly accurate. It faces a densely treed green square. The only two London members of the exclusive Relais et Châteaux group are 11 Cadogan Gardens and its sister hotel further round the square, The Chelsea Townhouse.
The interior is just as eclectic. A maze of lacquered cloistered sequestered panelled hallways and lobbies and corridors and passageways leads into the consciously picturesque opalescent Drawing Room. Starched linen at the ready, afternoon tea awaits, designed to instil a divine inertia into the remainder of a stimulating day. Decked and bedecked, espaliered and jardinièred, the Terrace is tucked between the townhouses and the mews. Alive with remote anticipation, it’s a place to dwell on the meaningfulness of life. Another surprising place is the Versailles inspired Mirrored Hall, a space designed to contemplate the advantage of beauty. Monochromatic photographs of supermodels line the descending staircase to the basement gym. Oil paintings of aristos line the ascending staircase to the bedrooms. Souls of different ages bordering the universe in process of consummation. This hotel has a distinct and dynamic personality, one that is warm and sensuous.
Over to the father of town planning Manning Robertson of Huntington Castle, County Carlow, for some pontification on not just Pont Street but classification itself. Everyday Architecture, 1948, “Definitions of architecture are as unsatisfactory as any other expositions of the aim and meaning of the arts; but if architecture is to be alive at all it must clearly involve the erection of buildings to suit the demands of the period, and the embellishment of those buildings according to the dictates of the materials in use, the treatment being a direct reflection of the outlook of the epoch, based of course upon past work, insofar as it is applicable. We cannot say that the 19th century, which produced principally a dead copying of the past, did not reflect itself truly; it was, on the contrary, amazingly accurate in illustrating that the worship of material prosperity is not consistent with a high level of art.”
