Bennett House, Grosvenor Estate (With Lodge And Gate Piers)

Bennett House is a tenement courtyard block of flats built between 1928 and 1930 as part of the Westminster Housing Scheme for the Grosvenor Estate. The design was undertaken with Sir Edwin Lutyens as a consultant. The building is constructed of grey brick and white rendered chequerboard external elevations, with grey brick and rendered access galleries to the courtyard. Stone dressings are used, and the roofs are concealed. The architectural style is stripped Georgian. It is six storeys high and four windows wide at the ends of the building, with long returns enclosing a rectangular courtyard. There are single-storey former lodges, square in plan, flanking the courtyard entrance with gate piers. Doorways are located on the ground floor, and galleries run along the courtyard elevations. The windows are flush framed glazing bar sashes. Parapet copings finish off the facades. The lodges each have one window and an oeil de boeuf (circular window) with pyramidal roofs; they are set out with gate piers at right angles to the street ends of the block’s long sides. This is an imaginative application of Lutyens’ design to a standard London County Council housing block.