Piccadilly Hotel

The Piccadilly Hotel, located at numbers 21-31 and 31A Piccadilly, with connections to Air Street and Regent Street, was built between 1905 and 1908. The design is a bold, neo-Baroque style, characteristic of R. Norman Shaw's later work. William Woodward and Walter Emden were responsible for the hotel’s interior design. The building presents fronts to Piccadilly, Regent Street Quadrant, Piccadilly Place, and Air Street.

The Piccadilly front is eleven bays wide and features a heavily rusticated ground floor with a large semicircular arcade acting as a podium for the rusticated first floor. A two-story open loggia terrace, screened by Roman Ionic columns and topped by an entablature with dentilled and bracketed cornices, rises above. The main block is set back behind the terrace, with projecting side wings. The left-hand, eight-story pavilion features a shaped gable with an obelisk finial, an aedicule, and was intended to be balanced by a similar pavilion on the right; however, the presence of numbers 19 and 20 prevented this symmetry.

The Regent Street Quadrant front, nine bays wide and following the curve of the street, has an arcaded podium with alternating bands of rock-faced rustication. This supports a giant order of coupled Roman Ionic columns in antis with partly blocked shafts, screening three stories between rusticated pavilion bays. Elaborately carved garland surrounds large third-floor oculi. A deep entablature and pedimented dormers are present in the attic area, and lofty, banded stone chimney stacks rise above. This Quadrant elevation was part of a wider scheme for rebuilding the Regent Street Quadrant, which was subsequently extended in amended form by Sir Reginald Blomfield and others.