For years before I joined Condé Nast, I used to peer through the revolving doors of Vogue House. Editors, stylists, fashionistas came and went, and you might spot famous photographers, too – David Bailey, Patrick Demarchelier, Norman Parkinson – and supermodels and celebrities. All visible from the rear window of a black cab as you sped by.
For magazine people, Vogue House was the centre of the London creative universe. Everyone acknowledged it, even if grudgingly. It had the best address – Number One, Hanover Square – perfectly located between Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street. For 75 years, Vogue House vested Conde Nast with a special, indefinable edge – intriguing, enviable, swanky.
It is sad the company is leaving. It feels like the ravens leaving the Tower of London or the apes quitting Gibraltar. Everything moves on, and no doubt the new Conde Nast digs will have faster, more reliable elevators and stronger WiFi. But a historic headquarters building, wrapped in mystique and legend, has a value beyond the balance sheet. This is a hymn of bittersweet homage and fond adieu to a beloved London landmark; a building that can claim a comparable glamour and treachery, artistry, ambition and treason to the Tower of London. Vogue House, like the Tower, became a tourist attraction. Conducted coach tours crawled by, “On your left, the home of all the famous glossy magazines…”
Princess Diana and Nicholas Coleridge outside Vogue House in 1994News Group Newspapers / News Licensing
Architecturally, Vogue House is a standard example of mid-Fifties art deco by the cinema architects Yates, Cook and Darbyshire, with a fabulous architrave and chiselled typography which should be listed. It functioned perfectly as a magazine HQ, with different titles on different floors, each with a distinct vibe of its own, almost always conforming to stereotype. So Vogue really was populated by fashionistas wearing black with killer heels; The World of Interiors by art school bohemians; Condé Nast Traveller by trailblazers with an adventurer-meets-suite-habitue air; Vanity Fair by distinctly polished minds.
When the lift doors opened, anyone could emerge – the (previous) Princess of Wales, Diana, dropped in regularly to inspect clothes on the rails or came to lunch; Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss, Naomi, Cara Delevingne; fashion and interior designers; sundry Prime Ministers; interns on coffee runs; jewellers delivering priceless tiaras and emerald necklaces for shoots; famous footballers dropping into GQ for grooming products; the Queen. All roads led to Hanover Square. Fashion assistants smoked on the roof, drivers smoked on the delivery ramp. Of the 900 staff working in Vogue House, at least 800 were women. At 7pm, at the end of the day, scores of young men congregated in the lobby, to collect their girlfriends. The mail room was perpetually awash with fresh flower deliveries. Orchids, generally.
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