New Zealand Chambers, the office building which Shaw erected in 1872-3 in Leadenhall Street in the City, was certainly totally unlike anything the Age of Anne ever saw except for the cut-brick detailing of the pedimented entrance. Boldly projecting red brick piers divided the tall façade into three bays, while between them rose oriel windows broken by ornately sculptured spandrels imitated from the mid-seventeenth-century ones on Sparrow’s House at Ipswich. The small panes and thick white sash-bars of these windows made the scale surprisingly domestic in contrast to the usual boldness of High Victorian commercial work, and the whole composition was effectively tied together by an ornately pargeted cove cornice that ran straight across the top (see Chapter 14). Above this the rather simple range of continuous dormers in the roof was very much in the spirit of the ‘ribbon-window’ bands on his country houses. So dazzled were contemporaries by the lush exuberance of Shaw’s ornament on the spandrels and the cove that they hardly noticed the way in which the bold articulation of this façade by the brick piers, with the areas between nearly all window, frankly reflecting the internal iron construction, provided most satisfactory lighting for the offices; nor that Shaw, while keeping his scale intimate in all the detailing, was not afraid to stress the verticality of his façade by avoiding emphasis on the storey lines. Only the weaker features of the design—the arbitrary asymmetry of the entrance, the profuse ornamentation, and the underscaling—were generally imitated. Lowther Lodge, built in 1873-4, a large free-standing mansion in Kensington Gore, still survives—it is now the home of the Royal Geographical Society—as New Zealand Chambers does not. Here the vocabulary of cut and moulded brick is more consistently Late Stuart, although the general composition, with many gables, two tall polygonal bay-windows, quantities of dormers, and tall fluted chimney stacks, is as romantically complex as that of Shaw’s manors in Sussex and Surrey. However, both the front and the rear façades, when studied, will be found to approximate symmetry in their principal portions as does the front of Glen Andred; and the main rooms inside, the hall at the front and the drawing-room behind, are quite symmetrical and have recognizably Early Georgian (rather than specifically Queen Anne) fireplaces and door and window casings, although their grouping is still, so to say, agglutinative.