020-8332 5655 Completed in 1877, this grand building cost the best part of a £1m and still looks a million dollars, with its sandstone facade and lavish trimmings, which include murals by Ford Madox Brown.
But in New York City, where lavish lofts sometimes sit behind industrial facades and doormen stand ready to chase away riffraff, open houses can also offer a peek at how the other half nests.
A sign hanging in the small historic district on President Street, a few steps off Smith, sums up the milieu: "Its brownstone facades, coherent in style, with lavish gardens between the houses and the street, create a charming period enclave".
There will be no lavish catalogs; instead the Art Production Fund's facade will post a phone number — (646) 775-2789 — at which people can hear artists discuss their projects.
Loew's 46th Street Theater Borough Park Opened in 1927, the Loew's 46th Street Theater was a lush example of architect John Eberson's style of lavish movie palaces -- it was rich with gold facades, ornate plaster sculptures, and faux Italian gardens.
He already owned a historic bank building on Warren Street; after a lavish renovation and a little stenciling on its mint-green facade ("Boulangerie, Bar, Patisserie") it now looks very French indeed — and the carriage house behind it makes a fine home for the massive oven he bought from a Percheron farmer and had shipped in a container to the United States.
Its undulating stone facade was one of the first examples of the lavish eclecticism later known as Art Deco.
But about 1930, the house was extensively altered, with a new wing and a lavish new organ room that caused "the careful balance of the original facade" to be lost, said Michael R. Corbett, an architectural historian who evaluated the property for the town.
The cathedral here, on which work began in the 12th century, was once the largest in Scotland, until a mob of reformers bent on eradicating lavish manifestations of "Popery" ransacked the place in 1559, leaving gulls to swoop through the surviving facade.
