37, King Street Wc2

TQ 3080 NW CITY OF WESTMINSTER KING STREET, WC2 72/17 14.1.70 No. 37 G.V. II* Terrace house. 1773-74 rebuild possibly by James Paine. Stock brick with red brick, stone and stucco dressings, slate roof. A late Palladian design certainly in the Paine idiom. 4 storeys, and basement. 3 windows wide. Stucco faced ground floor with semicircular arched doorway to left up steps, recessed panelled door and fanlight with doorhead string carried out as impost over slender pilaster strips and to right over similar frame to wide elliptically arched later C.19 display window; above each pilaster an elongated console bracket supports ground floor cornice. The latter reads as plinth of pseudo pedestal to 1st floor semicircular arched recesses containing recessed glazing bar sashes under flat gauged arches. Proportionately lower recessed glazing bar sashes to 2nd floor on sill band. The 3rd floor has a modified Diocletian with blind side lights in a large semicircular red brick arched recess rising from band course. An open stone corniced pediment frames and crowns the whole with short returns of cornice on block brackets stopped against the Diocletian recess. The pediment feature is repeated in simplified form to rear above broad canted bay. Simple cast iron area railings to front returned up steps. Interior has fine hall and staircase; the hall ceiling has 3 flat domes with bosses on panelled pendentives divided by transverse arches on scrolled consoles; the staircase of semi elliptical plan has stone treads and bombe square section wrought iron balusters rising to 2nd floor but with the compartment carried up through galleried 3rd floor landing to top flight where the walls are finished off with modified Corinthian cornice having satyr masks over the modillions and in between fluting and paterae to the corona; the 2nd floor landing has fluted frieze enriched with urns and vases and the compartment wall has plain round headed niches on each floor. The rooms have little of their original decoration apart from good enriched cornices, panelled shutters etc. Survey of London; Vol. XXXVI.

Listing NGR: TQ3024180892