75-6, Wimpole Street

1900/0/10369 WIMPOLE STREET 22-DEC-05 75-6

II Pair of townhouses, now mostly offices and flats. 1897 with minor C20 alterations. Rubbed red brick with moulded brick window arches and painted stone dressings. Eclectic Queen Anne and Flemish Renaissance style. EXTERIOR: The houses are each of four storeys with Dutch gabled attics. Entrance porches are paired to centre of the pair, these with arches on columns with elaborately carved capitals, and a short balustrade above. Each ground floor has three windows to outside of entrance, these with leaded overlights. Above this, a first floor oriel with full-height closely-spaced round-arched windows, also with leaded overlights, and moulded brick arches; a single similar window at this floor above the porch, and a continuous moulded cornice across the pair. Second and third floors have three windows each with painted aprons below. Quoins to outside and doubled to centre of the pair. Dutch gabled attics have a pair of three-light windows each and a diminutive pair below the pediment at the apex. INTERIOR: Interest includes a large amount of original joinery throughout such as moulded architraves, doors, and cornices, elliptical arched openings and lavish C18-style chimneypieces, and decorative plasterwork. Plan form is largely intact with entrance lobbies to the hall through glazed timber screens, that to No.75 with a leaded fanlight and broken apex scrolled pediment. Of particular note are the full-height open-string staircases around an open well with square-section vase-type balusters, panelled dado, arcaded screens at the landings, and with glazed lanterns over the well. Rear room of No.76 has plaster medallions with putti in the frieze. Some alterations for subdivision into flats and conversion to office use, but the original interiors are largely intact.

Listed as a pair of late-C19 townhouses that have striking facades of eclectic Queen Anne and Flemish Renaissance style and high quality materials, as well as richly fitted out interiors of the period including joinery, plasterwork, chimneypieces and impressive open-well staircases. The pair has good group value with near-by listed buildings and together forms an attractive and comprehensively well-designed ensemble of late-C19 townhouses with intact interiors.