Knightsbridge Living
Lennox Gardens
Smith's Charity allowed each prospective homeowner to design and build his own house. This is no Georgian Crescent. It is a bit like those collections of china replicas of Dutch houses you can buy at airports. The unifying feature is that the houses are all brick-built with “stone” surrounds framing porches, doors and windows and painted cream. Most of the houses are four main storeys, with an extra floor in the Dutch gable roof, and a basement.
On the west side of Lennox Gardens the houses are like the Coldstream Guards - not identical but dressed the same way. Numbers 10 to 26 are pleasantly uniform and restrained in style. All have heavy semi-circular arched porches in shaped brickwork, built in pairs. The main doors are set back within the frontage. Above these porches is a cantilevered stone balcony with metal railings, which serve French doors on the first floor of each pair of adjoining houses. The ground floor windows are square-headed. There is a cornice and a brickwork frieze above the ground floor windows which connect the line of balconies. At the first floor level the windows were originally "6-over-1" style with a semi-circular fanlight under a marching brick arch. Above the first floor, there is a more ornamental frieze which has a brickwork pediment above, and that stretches as far as the sill of the second floor. The second floor windows are generally flat-topped. The third floor windows are topped with a low arch. There is a highly decorative frieze marking what would normally be the balustrade along the top of a roof. There are brick pilasters between the third floor windows as if supporting the frieze. Above the main roof line are gables with windows in the gable itself and dormer windows in the sloping roof between the gables.
Nos. 28 to 34 were built as a unit and mark a change of style in the terrace. The houses still have a porch and a recessed entrance door, but the porch is less elaborate, with a low arch of brick and a keystone. This pattern is attractively copied into the window arches on the ground and first floors. There is liberal use of terracotta bunches of flowers and urns as surface decorations above first floor level. The houses all have canted bays at basement, ground and first floor level. There is a single balcony at first floor level. Most people use the recess between the bays for potted plants. There is another smaller balcony on the canted bay at second floor level. Generally, only the windows are painted. But in some cases, the underside of the balcony and the area wall are painted white. The ornamental brackets under the balconies of 10 to 26 were formed of moulded brick or terracotta.
Nos. 36 to 42 are much less ornamented. The designer reverted to Regency pediments above many of the windows, and number 40 has a false classical balustrade under the second floor windows. Nos. 44 to 50 have no use for stucco except around the arch of the porch. The windows are either brick-lined or have stone pediments.
