David leech plus#
David leech windows#

Exterior and interior characters were disparate and the attitude departed dismally from the original classical building. The lower entrance ducked under a flight of stairs which led to the upper flat through the communal front door. ‘The house as we found it was Victorian in its vertical proportions but modern in its horizontal scale.’ ‘We had a strange scenario where rooms had three- or four-metre-high ceilings but one room was less than 2m wide – I could put my hands out and touch both walls’, explains Leech. The return became a separate house, and the five-storey main house was made into seven incongruous units.

David leech windows#

In the 1970s the property underwent a brutal and expedient conversion, during which it was stripped of all ornamentation, and its original bipartite plan – of front and rear reception rooms – was subdivided into a tripartite arrangement with windows added into the end gable wall. By 1901 it was already in multiple occupancy, as a boarding house for artists. Speculative developer William Willet had hoped to appeal to the aristocracy with his large and opulent crescent but he missed the mark in terms of good taste. London’s mercurial property market has influenced the fate of this house since its inception in 1878. Instead, they were living across two unconnected flats on the lower-ground and ground floors of a large Victorian townhouse – 130m 2 in all. Their ideal would be a house, but property prices rendered that impossible. Leech’s clients are a couple with two adult children, and whose work and social lives are firmly embedded in their leafy north London locale. Like them, he is preoccupied with the relationship between fact and fiction and the ‘double take’, and shares their slightly subversive sense of humour. ‘As artists, Fischli and Weiss were not really interested in truthfulness but in experience, and I hope that my architecture is an experience,’ explains Leech. Fewer still would have recognised the assembled bric-a-brac as meticulously hand-carved polyurethane, in a complex exploration of form, function, ‘phantoms’, replicas and visual jokes. Only some would have identified this as an installation by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Shortly after its opening, in 2000, visitors to Tate Modern would have stumbled upon an unfinished room containing half-empty paint buckets and planks of wood. In trying to locate a specific reference, I find myself taking a circuitous route via a grand Victorian terrace, an eclectic urban mews, mid-century Milan, classical ruins, a Mediterranean garden and, unexpectedly, Tate Modern.

This ‘house within a house’ reminds me of something, but I’m not sure what – an observation which delights Leech. ‘I’m more interested in fictions and readings.’ There is certainly more than meets the eye in this far-from-straightforward renovation and duplex de-conversion, and, had I not been in such enlightened company, I may never have seen beyond the veil. Combining the Bankmaster and Equation teams will give us the critical mass of assets and skills which are necessary to offer the best technology, products and services to our customers.‘I’m not interested in honesty or authenticity,’ says architect David Leech, rather boldly, as we stand outside 27 Belsize Crescent. Kevin Lomax, chairman, Misys, says: 'In-house mainframe solutions are increasingly unaffordable and cannot be adapted fast enough to meet new demands, such as multi-channel, high-touch retail services and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week banking.

David leech plus#

The new Retail Banking business will will combine Kindle's Bankmaster product range with the leading Equation product in Misys International Banking Systems, offering a choice of platforms based on both Unix/Oracle and i-Series, plus interfaces to other Misys products such as Opics, Trade Innovation & Meridian. Rupert Soames, CEO of the Misys Banking and Securities Division, will take over from Fry when he steps aside in June. In a separate move, John Fry is also to leave as CEO of Misys International Banking Systems to take up the position as chief executive of one of the leading UK independent media businesses. Under the restructuring, David Leech will be stepping down from his role as CEO of Kindle and will be leaving the company. It will account for nearly 20% of total revenues in the Misys Banking and Securities division. The new unit will be the largest vendor of retail banking systems outside the US, with combined revenues of in excess of £60 million and 600 customer sites worldwide.