Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo designed this building at 3-4 Sloane Street after the the upper section of Sloane Street was widened between Knightsbridge and Basil Street. This required the rebuilding of some of the properties, including the Swan pub which had stood on the site in some form or other since at least 1699. The owner of the property, Messrs Roberts & Gilling commissioned Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo who created this free-Baroque design, in red brick with stone dressings of four storeys. The Swan Pub was accommodated into the ground and basement floors, with flats to the upper storeys. The architect and writer Harry Stewart Goodhart-Rendel is known to have commented on Mackmurdo and this Sloane Street pub in particular in an interview with Nikolaus Pevsner. He condemned MackMurdo as he did Voysey by describing them as not serious architects, and went on say ‘he [Mackmurdo] did a terrible pub at Sloane Street, the sort of thing one’s small daughter would design.’ (Interview between Nikolaus Pevsner and Harry Stewart Goodhart-Rendel, c.1946, published in Architectural Review, 1966)
