The architectures and interior spaces of Bourne and Hollingsworth were built around these respectable practices and were infused with these cultures of quite conservatism. Stafford Borne was mindful that the new building for the shop built in the 1920s represented an enormous expense and would need to see the store through many decades, He chose with caution, avoiding fashionable modern retail architect, and commissioning the architectural practice of John Slater. Tellingly, the Slaters were close family friends and neighbours, with offices practically next door at 46 Berners Street. The firm had built its reliable reputation as architects and surveyors to the Berners Estate, on whose land Bourne and Hollingsworth was situated. John Slater’s own son and partner J. Alan slater acknowledge the conservatism of the firm’s early twentieth-century work, ‘I am bound to say, to modern eyes, these buildings were not particularly distinguished from the architectural point of view, but were all well planned, efficiently built and proved to be profitable to the developer.’ Bourne had already tested out these architects with structural alterations to the old shop, a nearby factory and garage, hostel facillites for staff, and alterations to the Bourne family home, Garston Manor in Hertfordshire.
When the drawings of the two main sections of the Bourne and Hollingsworth building on Berners Street and Oxford Street were published in the architects’ trade journal the builder in the 1920s, they did not cause much of stir. In the spectacular, novelty-filled world of metropolitan retailing this was perhaps missing a trick. The stripped classicism of the major 1925 section echoed well-known nearby Edwardian commercial buildings like John Burnet’s Kodak building in Kingsway of 1911 and smith and Brewer’s store for Heal’s in Tottenham Court Road of 1917, but lacked some of their and rational simplicity. In short, the store was a slightly old-fashoined building when built, at precisely the time when best of London’s retail architecture was becoming highly experimental, drawing on the talents of some of the best modern architect, and attracting the attention of the architectural press. The new retail architecture included the glossy frontages of the brash new chain stores, for example Joseph Emberton’s designs for the style and Mantle, and Percy Westwood’s for Austin Reed. In comparison whit these buildings. Bourne and Hollingsworth was a little sedate and unfashionable, and the investment had equally failed to provide an idiosyncratic landmark department store building, like Selfridge’s overblown neoclassical splendor of 1909 or liberty’s nostalgic ‘Tudor house’ of 1924.