Doll, Charles Fitzroy

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Doll, Charles Fitzroy (1850–1929). English architect, educated in Germany and in the office of Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, where he worked on the drawings for the India Office, Whitehall, London (1866–8). He was appointed Surveyor to the Bedford Estates in Bloomsbury and Covent Garden, London (1885). He designed the Hotel Russell (1898), a luxuriant essay in the François Ier style, based on the Château de Madrid, Paris (1528–1785), clad in thé-au-lait terracotta, and the Imperial Hotel, of a few years later, which Pevsner described as a ‘vicious mixture of Art Nouveau Gothic and Art Nouveau Tudor’, to which he might have added ‘Bavarian spires’. It was demolished in the late 1960s, and, like the Hotel Russell, stood in Russell Square. Its replacement is banal. Doll was also responsible for the exquisitely detailed Flemish Franco-Gothic terrace of shops with apartments over them in Torrington Place (1907). His practice continued under his son, C. C. T. Doll (1880–1955), who was partly responsible for reconstructing the grand staircase of the Palace of King Minos, Knossos, Crete.

Bibliography

A. S. Gray (1985);
Pevsner (ed.): BoE, London 2 (1952)

A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

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Doll, Charles Fitzroy

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