the mayfair hotel

This striking piece of high Art Deco / Bauhaus was a complete mystery when I came across it by chance in the National Archives. For such a knockout it didn't even register a bell among decades of my familiar background buildingscapes, but some googling later showed it to be the Mayfair Hotel in Bayswater Road, Kings Cross, right next door to the old Hampton Court.

These pics were taken when it opened in 1937, which probably accounts for the photo-friendly uniformity of the window dressing in this shot, and as far as I can tell these are the full range of images that remain of it.

The size of its elaborate brick crest is unique to Sydney buildings of this style.

Especially given there's three stories of it on top of a building with only seven floors.

In a city where street awnings were usually practical affairs that deserved no more budget than the purpose they served, here it was detailed as decoration to the sleek simplicity above. Shiny chrome, stepping up, down, and wrapping around the curve of the pavement.

This shot is taken from a council archive of 1960s roadworks, and looks down the street to the Mayfair at ground level. The sign Tooths Ales in the previous pic has become Public Bar in the one above.

The lobby and lifts are an opera of thirties style; polished rolled timber panelling, heavy carpet, sweeping lines.

The public bar. Tiled throughout, from the counter to the ceiling, as were all Aussie pubs until the seventies. Something to do with regulations introduced after a riot by soldiers marching off to WW1, history has it. But that's another post.

The saloon bar, in timeles timber and chrome. Later copied by sixties modernism and noughties minimalism.

I grew up in a time when interiors like that were common but had become passe. I remember wondering how anyone could have ever liked such laboured old-fashionedness. Now ...

Some researching leads me to deduce the restaurant was located on the first floor along the length of its east side. In the pic above, a vase sits on a pedestal in the rounded corner,

- as it does here, behind the actress Gladys Montcrieff snapped at lunch, though in this instance it looks more like an exotic headdress.

Next is the lounge, which I think must have been at the far end of the restaurant. More beautiful lines and polished timber, classy but modern.

So, from 1937 when it was the latest thing on the block

the Mayfair lasted only thirty five years, when it was removed

to make way for the brutalist Kingsgate Hotel, great slabs of grey concrete

which itself only lasted thirty five years before recently being refurbished as flats.

This shot shows the Kingsgate going up at the head of William St in 1972.

The entire block was levelled for it, but a Coke sign on one of the old buildings was replaced by the landmark that's still there today. Although that, too, will wait for another post.