John Loughborough Pearson

William Waldorf Astor commissioned the architect John Loughborough Pearson (5 July 1817 – 11 December 1897) to design Two Temple Place in 1892. He was famed for his work on churches and several cathedrals and had won the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) gold medal in 1880. He would go on to be buried in Westminster Abbey with the finest creative talents of the nation. He was well aligned with WWA as he was also a conservative and private – his gravestone reads “sustinuit et abstinuit”, sustain and abstain. But he also wanted to awe: his standard for his work was “will it bring them to their knees?”. Two Temple Place was almost the last project he worked on before his death in 1897 and much of it was completed by his son, Frank.

Pearson preferred the natural colours of materials, whether stone or wood, to the use of paint, allowing the materials to accentuate their own decoration. This is very clear in the tonal variation achieved by different woods at Two Temple Place, notably in the Stairs Gallery. Ebony, mahogany, sabecu (in the now lost original bedroom), oak, satinwood, walnut and cedar are all used to vary the tone and reflectivity of the spaces. Colour, in glass or stone, thus stands out where it is used, remarkable in all its vibrancy. RIBA holds many of his drawings for Two Temple Place and they show how closely the final product is to his vision.

The craftsmen Pearson chose to work with on the Two Temple Place project were all known to him, indeed he rarely worked with local craftsmen and had had an early association with the foundations that would become the South London Technical School of Art. He therefore felt able to trust the Makers with even a project of a very different style to the ecclesiastical Gothic Revival and for such a particular client in Astor.