Luxury Art Deco Living Returns to Streatham
By: T2S Architecture
Our client procured this beautiful Art Deco building on Streatham High Street and engaged T2S Architecture Ltd to extend, remodel and refurbish the building to create a mixed-use development.
We undertook a detailed historic and architecture assessment of the building and discovered that its Art Deco roots were a little more engrained than purely the superficial. Streatham High Street is famous for its Luxury Department store which latterly inspired the creation of John Lewis. Equally, the high street was infamous for a high class madame – both of which inspired the naming of the much loved bar ‘Pratts & Payne’. This signage for this bar echoes the high class, up market, high society stylings of Art Deco which sit perfectly on this high street.
The building itself is a fantastic example of the Burton’s menswear retail store. The Architect used Art Deco as his inspiration, and you can see lots of similar examples of the Burton’s façade up and down the UK high street’s.
When we looked at the existing building, besides the frontage, the Architecture and form was confused and convoluted. Our first intention was to reinstate some of the lost historic features and ‘complete’ the form at the rear. MEP equipment and a tired fire escape were removed, as they further detracted from the buildings splendour. We believed the existing building could be increased in size whilst retaining the buildings quality
without impacting the conservation area.
The Art Deco Architectural language often takes numerous forms. There is the Miami based – white rendered – horizontal formed buildings inspired by the invention of development of the aviation industry of its time. Then there is the New York / Gatesby style of shining materials and strong dominant forms to evoke the luxury and high society of the roaring 1920’s.
We felt the latter was more appropriate for this building, linking the Gatesby references with the high society of the Pratts & Payne history. A metallic reflective form was used, with curved forms stretching from the existing geometry helping to soften the strong geometric shapes of the existing language. These curved forms were inspired by classic Art Deco patterns where interweaving circles create luxurious fabric and jewellery. They extend and set back to provide a odd and even emphasise whilst allowing us to create recesses for daylight.
T2S love working on existing buildings and think this is a really good example of how Architectural excellence can be achieved on constrained historic buildings.
We are proud to feature and promote in our architecture magazine this stunning Art Deco restoration in Streatham
