75 Holland Road, Hove
Encyclopedia
The building at 75 Holland Road in Hove
Hove
Hove is a town on the south coast of England, immediately to the west of its larger neighbour Brighton, with which it forms the unitary authority Brighton and Hove. It forms a single conurbation together with Brighton and some smaller towns and villages running along the coast...

, part of the English coastal city of Brighton and Hove, is now in residential use as loft-style apartments called Palmeira Yard, but was originally a repository belonging to the Brighton & Hove Co-operative Supply Association, the main cooperative business organisation
Cooperative
A cooperative is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit...

 in the area. Elaborately designed in 1893 in the French Second Empire style by local architect Thomas Lainson
Thomas Lainson
Thomas Lainson was a British architect. He is best known for his work in the East Sussex coastal towns of Brighton and Hove , where several of his eclectic range of residential, commercial and religious buildings have been awarded listed status by English Heritage...

 of the firm Lainson & Sons, the storage building had built-in stables and was lavishly decorated with terracotta
Terra cotta
Terracotta, Terra cotta or Terra-cotta is a clay-based unglazed ceramic, although the term can also be applied to glazed ceramics where the fired body is porous and red in color...

. After a period of ownership by haulage and removals company Pickfords
Pickfords
Pickfords is a moving company based in the United Kingdom, part of the Moving Services Group UK Ltd.The business is believed to have been founded in the 17th century, making it one of the UK's oldest functioning companies. The earliest record is of a William Pickford, a carrier who worked south of...

, who used the building for furniture storage, a local architecture firm carried out the conversion into mixed-use live-work units
Mixed-use development
Mixed-use development is the use of a building, set of buildings, or neighborhood for more than one purpose. Since the 1920s, zoning in some countries has required uses to be separated. However, when jobs, housing, and commercial activities are located close together, a community's transportation...

 between 2004 and 2006. English Heritage
English Heritage
English Heritage . is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...

 has listed the building at Grade II for its architectural and historical importance.

History

The seaside resort
Seaside resort
A seaside resort is a resort, or resort town, located on the coast. Where a beach is the primary focus for tourists, it may be called a beach resort.- Overview :...

 of Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...

, on the English Channel
English Channel
The English Channel , often referred to simply as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates southern England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about long and varies in width from at its widest to in the Strait of Dover...

 coast, developed rapidly from the mid-18th century, and by the late 19th century it was a large town was significant regional importance as a commercial centre. Neighbouring Hove developed later in response to Brighton's growth, principally as a residential area with streets of spacious, high-quality houses.

Brighton was a pioneer in the cooperative movement
History of the cooperative movement
The history of the cooperative movement concerns the origins and history of cooperatives. Although cooperative arrangements, such as mutual insurance, and principles of cooperation existed long before, the cooperative movement began with the application of cooperative principles to business...

: it adopted Robert Owen
Robert Owen
Robert Owen was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement.Owen's philosophy was based on three intellectual pillars:...

's ideas very early, and England's first co-operative store opened on West Street in 1828. A journal, The Co-operator, was started soon afterwards by local doctor William King
William King (doctor)
Dr. William King was a British physician and philanthropist from Brighton. He is best known as an early supporter of the Cooperative Movement....

; it helped inspire the Rochdale Pioneers
Rochdale Pioneers
The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844, was an early consumer co-operative, and the first to pay a patronage dividend, forming the basis for the modern co-operative movement....

 and other early cooperatives in England. Other associations were formed elsewhere in Brighton and Hove in 1846, 1860 and 1887. By the 1880s, the Brighton & Hove Co-operative Supply Association, based in Hove, was one of the main groups; they needed more space in the town for their operations, especially for storage, and they appointed local architecture firm Lainson & Sons as their in-house architects. The firm consisted of Thomas Lainson
Thomas Lainson
Thomas Lainson was a British architect. He is best known for his work in the East Sussex coastal towns of Brighton and Hove , where several of his eclectic range of residential, commercial and religious buildings have been awarded listed status by English Heritage...

, a Brighton man who had designed buildings of all types around the two towns since the early 1860s, and his sons Thomas J. and Arthur.

Their first building for the Association was Palmeira House, an office building designed in 1887. It stood at the top of the late Regency
Regency architecture
The Regency style of architecture refers primarily to buildings built in Britain during the period in the early 19th century when George IV was Prince Regent, and also to later buildings following the same style...

/Italianate
Italianate architecture
The Italianate style of architecture was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. In the Italianate style, the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian Renaissance architecture, which had served as inspiration for both Palladianism and...

 Palmeira Square residential development, and the Lainsons' design complemented this. Six years later, the Association required an annexe to Palmeira House, to be used for storage of large and fragile items, distribution and the stabling of horses and early motor vehicles. Assisted by his sons, Thomas Lainson designed and built the repository in 1893. Its elaborate design, in red brick with extensive use of terracotta and wrought iron and with a steep roof, contrasted with the formal stucco
Stucco
Stucco or render is a material made of an aggregate, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as decorative coating for walls and ceilings and as a sculptural and artistic material in architecture...

 of Palmeira House and the surrounding area. A plaque installed over the entrance recorded the date and architects' names.

The removal and distribution company Pickfords
Pickfords
Pickfords is a moving company based in the United Kingdom, part of the Moving Services Group UK Ltd.The business is believed to have been founded in the 17th century, making it one of the UK's oldest functioning companies. The earliest record is of a William Pickford, a carrier who worked south of...

 took over the building in 1950. For several decades thereafter, they used it as a furniture repository; the interior was divided into storage units, and the commemorative plaque was moved inside to the courtyard where the former stables stood. Early in the 21st century, the building was sold, and the Brighton branch of architects R.H. Partnership were commissioned to convert the interior into 20 loft apartments which could also be used as live-work units
Mixed-use development
Mixed-use development is the use of a building, set of buildings, or neighborhood for more than one purpose. Since the 1920s, zoning in some countries has required uses to be separated. However, when jobs, housing, and commercial activities are located close together, a community's transportation...

. Work took place between July 2004 and 2006.

The former repository was listed at Grade II by English Heritage
English Heritage
English Heritage . is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...

 on 31 May 1974. As of February 2001, it was one of 1,124 Grade II-listed buildings and structures, and 1,218 listed buildings of all grades, in the city of Brighton and Hove. Another Grade II-listed building—John Wills' Purbeck stone
Purbeck Marble
Purbeck Marble is a fossiliferous limestone quarried in the Isle of Purbeck, a peninsula in south-east Dorset, England.It is one of many kinds of Purbeck Limestone, deposited in the late Jurassic or early Cretaceous periods....

 Gothic Revival
Gothic Revival architecture
The Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the 1740s in England...

 Holland Road Baptist Church
Holland Road Baptist Church
Holland Road Baptist Church is a Baptist church in Hove, part of the English city of Brighton and Hove. Built in 1887 to replace a temporary building on the same site, which had in turn superseded the congregation's previous meeting place in a nearby gymnasium, it expanded to take in nearby...

 of 1887—stands at 71 Holland Road to the south, and the Jugendstil-inspired Hove Hebrew Congregation Synagogue is just north of the former repository at number 79, on the corner of Lansdowne Road.

Architecture

The repository has been described as a "fine work" by the prolific Thomas Lainson
Thomas Lainson
Thomas Lainson was a British architect. He is best known for his work in the East Sussex coastal towns of Brighton and Hove , where several of his eclectic range of residential, commercial and religious buildings have been awarded listed status by English Heritage...

. It was designed distinctively in the French Second Empire style with some Queen Anne
Queen Anne Style architecture
The Queen Anne Style in Britain means either the English Baroque architectural style roughly of the reign of Queen Anne , or a revived form that was popular in the last quarter of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century...

 elements. Lainson made lavish use of terracotta
Terra cotta
Terracotta, Terra cotta or Terra-cotta is a clay-based unglazed ceramic, although the term can also be applied to glazed ceramics where the fired body is porous and red in color...

 to decorate the building, which is mostly of red brick with slate mansard roof
Mansard roof
A mansard or mansard roof is a four-sided gambrel-style hip roof characterized by two slopes on each of its sides with the lower slope at a steeper angle than the upper that is punctured by dormer windows. The roof creates an additional floor of habitable space, such as a garret...

s. The design is U-shaped and encloses a gated courtyard. Apart from the centre bay
Bay (architecture)
A bay is a unit of form in architecture. This unit is defined as the zone between the outer edges of an engaged column, pilaster, or post; or within a window frame, doorframe, or vertical 'bas relief' wall form.-Defining elements:...

 on the Holland Road (western) elevation, which rises to four storeys with an attic storey above, the building is three-storey with attics. The Holland Road façade has nine bays in a 1:3:1:3:1 formation, the three-bay sections being slightly recessed. The outermost bays are topped by elaborate gable
Gable
A gable is the generally triangular portion of a wall between the edges of a sloping roof. The shape of the gable and how it is detailed depends on the structural system being used and aesthetic concerns. Thus the type of roof enclosing the volume dictates the shape of the gable...

s which hide the attic space; the centre bay also has an ornately treated gable at roof level, containing round porthole
Porthole
A porthole is a generally circular, window used on the hull of ships to admit light and air. Porthole is actually an abbreviated term for "port hole window"...

-style timber-framed windows. Some of the other windows have prominent transom
Transom (architectural)
In architecture, a transom is the term given to a transverse beam or bar in a frame, or to the crosspiece separating a door or the like from a window or fanlight above it. Transom is also the customary U.S. word used for a transom light, the window over this crosspiece...

s and mullion
Mullion
A mullion is a vertical structural element which divides adjacent window units. The primary purpose of the mullion is as a structural support to an arch or lintel above the window opening. Its secondary purpose may be as a rigid support to the glazing of the window...

s of terracotta; they vary between round-headed and flat-arched. The doorway is also arched, this time in the segmental style. The roofs are steep and are topped with parapet
Parapet
A parapet is a wall-like barrier at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony or other structure. Where extending above a roof, it may simply be the portion of an exterior wall that continues above the line of the roof surface, or may be a continuation of a vertical feature beneath the roof such as a...

s of wrought iron
Wrought iron
thumb|The [[Eiffel tower]] is constructed from [[puddle iron]], a form of wrought ironWrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon...

.
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