Greybrook House

Greybrook House on Brook Street is a six-storey building of L-plan form, built in 1929 by Sir John Burnet & Partners as a showroom with practice rooms and offices above for Bechstein, the piano manufacturer. It wraps around the corner intersection of Brook Street and the Haunch of Venison Yard via a curved junction.

The building is steel-framed with concrete floor plates and brown stock brick walls. Its principal façade on Brook Street and the first part of the return into the Haunch of Venison Yard are clad in Portland stone.

The building's chief architectural interest lies in its Art Deco treatment. The facades feature reeded and fluted, or corrugated, panels in the stonework, particularly prominent on the corner elevation and at the top where there is a double set-back. The elevations are characterized by deeply set-back elongated metal-framed windows with low metal balustrades. The most striking single feature is an octagonal, eye-like window surrounded by a ribbon-like metal reeding at first-floor level on the corner elevation. The doorway to the offices on the left side of the Brook Street frontage and the doorway to the ground-floor shop, created from what was originally a showroom window, together with its windows, are set in simple openings in the Portland stone façade.

The interior retains the original staircase and central lift, as well as the glazed wooden doors that provide access on each floor to the offices at the front and rear of the building. These are simply but well detailed. However, original features elsewhere have been removed along with the partitions that originally subdivided the upper floors. The modern office interiors and ground-floor shop are not of special architectural interest.

Bechstein was a German piano manufacturer founded in Berlin in 1853 by Friedrich Wilhelm Carl Bechstein. Following successful receptions at the 1862 London exhibition and the 1867 Paris exhibition, the firm's output grew from 300 instruments annually in the 1860s to 5,000 in the years preceding the First World War, with the British market taking half of this production. Bechstein became London's largest piano dealership. In 1901 the firm opened a concert room for recitals known as the Bechstein Hall next to its showrooms on Wigmore Street. During the First World War, Bechstein, like other German firms in Britain, experienced hostility and declined. The firm's affairs were wound up in 1916 by the Board of Trade, and its entire business—including studios, offices, warehouses, 137 pianos, and the Hall itself, which reopened in 1917 as the Wigmore Hall—was sold at auction to Debenhams for £56,500. No. 28 Brook Street was built in 1929 as Bechstein sought to re-establish a visible presence in the British piano market. The ground floor is now a shop while the upper floors serve as offices.

Sir John Burnet, who led the practice, received the RIBA Gold Medal in 1922 and is noted for pioneering the Beaux Arts style in the Edwardian period and for his promotion of masterly stone cutting. In the inter-war period the practice increasingly worked in the Moderne Movement and Art Deco styles. Greybrook House represents a well-detailed and pleasing essay in Art Deco with little external alteration.