Simon Henley on Dixon Jones’ inventive addition behind an art deco facade

Words
Simon Henley
Photos
Paul Riddle

35 Marylebone High Street is a great ziggurat which humbly retains and preserves an art deco facade. It does this for a number of reasons. As its architect, Edward Jones of Dixon Jones asks, “Do the streets of London need to be littered with even more inept examples of contemporary elevations?” Especially when they “found merit in the existing 1930s elevation and could find no motive for its replacement”. But also, the architects knew that its seven-storey facade was a relative giant in this high street setting and sheltered a potential volume of development in its lee that would be lost if it was replaced. As Jones explains, “form follows finance”.

In fact, the scheme has increased the size of the building by removing a peninsula of post-war office space and replacing it with a broader footprint. The design subtracts much of the bulk of the 1960s extension added by the BBC, which loomed over the interior of the urban block and the mews to the rear. This it replaces with a terraced section of east-facing apartments which rises above the waterline of Georgian London. In so doing, the design treats the city skyline as a landscape on which to build. Standing in one of the apartments reminded me of the moment when a plane emerges above the clouds to reveal an open expanse of space. I also couldn’t help thinking about the drawing Dixon Jones made of its National Portrait Gallery restaurant perched on an illusory landscape, that turns out to be the rooftops of Whitehall and Soho recast as terra firma.

Walking around the building, dipping in and out of apartments, felt a bit like sampling cuts of meat, all the time trying to piece together the whole animal. The apartments behind the retained deco facade owe much to its elevation. The arrangement of rooms, their dimension and proportion, are all a particular response to the original distribution of windows. These rooms – these subcutaneous spaces – have been grafted onto the back of the facade. By contrast the east-facing spaces which are predominantly living rooms are more fluid in plan, the threshold between inside and out marked by brick posts and sliding glazed screens which open onto north-, south- and east-facing patios. In turn these outside spaces are also framed, here by pergolas constructed from stone posts and hardwood joists. The pergola is a recurring trope in Dixon Jones’ work, and one can understand why the architects like it, because it suggests a ruin and evokes Arcadia.

Below the ziggurat, a second type – a terrace of five townhouses – girdles the north and east sides of the building. Each is three storeys and organised around an internal atrium with a retractable glazed roof. The atrium facilitates an implausibly deep plan – at least on paper – with a lower-ground-floor kitchen to the rear and a living space extending to the mews. There is more living space on the upper-ground floor which also overlooks the mews. The rest of this floor and the one above accommodate bedrooms. The master bedroom on the upper-ground floor, with its enfilade of bedroom, dressing room and bathroom is exactly what you expect in a pyramid with the pharaoh’s treasures stored away deep inside. Right now, these courtyard townhouses are intended to serve immense wealth, but beneath it all is a robust typology which in different economic circumstances would make a great artist’s studio.

Outside, the plan establishes a clear shape and scale to the mews. And, thanks to the section, it’s not possible to see the ziggurat of apartments above. The houses are faced in stone on the lowest storey and brick above. The five houses form a terrace, each marked by a step in the frontage. The elevation is most successful when seen obliquely. At the northern end of the mews the warm grey De Lank Cornish granite plinth is terminated by a storey-high pylon nested into the corner. Perhaps it is a ‘hinge’ like James Stirling’s unbuilt 1980 project for Columbia University, or simply a ‘stone’ to protect the corner as is traditional. The north elevation reveals the flank wall of a house, and the glazed wall of its atrium. It also incorporates a deep, wide gash into which the car lifts are set and the arcaded outside space of the one flat that tunnels its way north-south through the body of the building. Finally, a typographical spiral in the stone, by Annet Stirling of Incisive Letterwork, commemorates the Marylebone Gardens, one of London’s principal eighteenth-century pleasure gardens which once occupied the site.

35 Marylebone High Street is a ‘Tale of Two Typologies’ – of courtyard houses and apartment buildings, but also of urban blocks and thoroughfares. Here, design is a process of subtraction and addition, of shifting the mass around, distributing it so as to – in large part – reduce its impact on the neighbouring buildings. Surprisingly, rights of light did not dictate the plan. Put it another way: the architects designed the building, submitted it for assessment, and weren’t required to modify the form for light. It requires a degree of humility and a great deal of experience to make 35 Marylebone High Street, to know what to do and not to do, to collaborate with another architect chosen to fit out your building and, to see it through when the scheme changes hands from one developer to another. The result is an appropriate and handsome building, with a clever and curious anatomy, defused only by the ostentation of interior design that contemporary taste appears to demand. 35 Marylebone High Street exploits the potential of latency in found objects and it is an ingenious amalgam of typologies, each of which plays its part in the city.

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