King Tut's London Digs – Cumberland Hotel, Oxford Street, London, England

J. Lyons & Co. was a market-dominant British restaurant chain, food manufacturing, and hotel conglomerate founded in 1884. It gradually went out of business in the 1960’s and 1970’s as its various components were sold off. The massive Cumberland Hotel behind Marble Arch was built for J. Lyons in 1930 at the height of the Art Deco mania for everything Egyptian sparked off by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Lyons’s in-house architect, F.J. Wills, decorated the facade with giant Egyptian figures and created a very odd new order of columns with bulls’ heads on the capitals. A rather nice little detail is that the Egyptians have different expressions on their faces, one having a rather twinkly smile.