Zimbabwe House

Zimbabwe House is a Grade II* listed building located in the City of Westminster, constructed between 1906 and 1908 by Charles Holden as part of the firm Adams and Holden for the British Medical Association. Originally, it featured shops on the ground floor. The building is clad in grey Cornish granite and Portland stone, with a steel frame and a slate roof. It showcases an exceptional neo-Mannerist design, incorporating classical motifs and forms that take advantage of the stone cladding.

The structure is a corner block with five storeys and a dormered mansard roof, with the top two storeys slightly recessed and finished in Portland stone. It has two windows facing the Strand, a canted corner, and a seven-window return to Agar Street. The main entrance is centrally located on the Agar Street front, featuring an isolated architrave and inset Doric columns. The entrance doorway and the ground and first-floor windows are set within sharply cut semi-circular arched recesses, flanked by broad pilaster-piers. The ground floor has transomed display windows, while the first floor features a tripartite window design reminiscent of Venetian or thermal windows, with small plane glazing and slender Doric columns.

The pilaster piers rise through breaks in the block cornice, leading to a complex tripartite composition of niches and windows on the second floor, which originally contained standing figures sculpted by Jacob Epstein, though these have since been mutilated. The pilaster theme continues on the third floor in a shallower relief, while on the fourth floor, the pilasters transform into buttress-piers, with two developed as chimney stacks. The entrance bay is slightly emphasized by the doubling of the pilaster theme. The building's horizontal stratification is highlighted by block cornices and sill cornices.