Stefan Buzás broke onto on the British architectural scene in 1952 with his design of ground-breaking shopfronts on Piccadilly. His ideas had a big impact on retail design as the sector boomed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Passers by, used to prosaic shopfronts set in heavy wooden frames which were packed with shelving, would stare in wonderment at the seamless glass spaces for Qantas Airways and the South African Tourist Board. Buzás’s design did away with the standard 2ft granite base or “store riser” at the bottom. Daylight would flow into the space, and people could look into the full, inviting depth of the interiors.

The projects featured in an article in the influential Architectural Review on “the changing face of the British shopfront”. It was the first time that glass came straight out of the pavement, and similar shopfronts soon became fashionable across London.

Stefan Buzás was born into a Jewish family in Tapolca, Hungary, in 1915. His father, a lawyer, was a committed socialist who was involved in the 100-day communist government in Budapest in 1919. When the regime was overthrown the family fled to Vienna, and as a young man Buzás studied at the Technische Hochschule faculty of architecture.

In the spring of 1938, when Austria had been annexed by Nazi Germany and the persecution of the country’s Jews was in full swing, Buzás fled to Britain. He never saw his parents again.

He settled in Hampstead and studied at the renowned Architectural Association, graduating in 1940. He then taught at the Kingston School of Art and in 1942 married the opera singer Joan Mills, with whom he had two daughters.

In 1948 he was one of the founding partners of James Cubitt & Partners along with three fellow students from the Architectural Association: James Cubitt, Fello Atkinson and Dick Maitland.

Buzás’s aesthetic was rooted in the Modernist school of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, but he was not fettered by the rational strictures of the movement. He established a reputation for a more human approach, using natural materials more reminiscent of Frank Lloyld Wright and the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. He was a close friend of the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, and shared with him the tendency to use softer materials of natural origin rather than the signature reinforced concrete and white finish of the Modernist movement or International Style.

Buzás’s blend of Modernism and Naturalism was used to great effect in exhibition spaces, and the success of his interior spaces for the Earth sciences section inside the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain (1951) made him a sought-after exhibition designer.

Other notable exhibition spaces included a room setting for a typical modern house at the British Exhibition in Stockholm (1962) and showrooms for the furniture design house Finmar, in Piccadilly.

As James Cubitt & Partners grew, it opened offices in Ghana and Nigeria, forging a reputation for airy, lightweight architecture, with brise-soleil façades and louvred screens and balconies, suited to the hot climate. One of the best of these was the Buzás-designed Agricultural Development Corporation building in Accra.

Another big project for the partnership was his design of interiors for a new terminal at Ringway airport, Manchester (1962), where he boldly specified three enormous chandeliers by the great Venetian glassmaker Venini.

In 1965 Buzás left James Cubitt & Partners to set up on his own and won commissions to design interiors for banks in London including Standard Bank, Schroeder Wagg and Lazards. The banking clients wanted corporate opulence in marble, glass and expensive woods but also sought a touch of the avant-garde that Buzás could give them.

Other commissions included interiors for the offices of Vogue magazine in Berkeley Square and for the Queen Elizabeth 2, which made her maiden voyage in 1969.

Buzás’s marriage was dissolved. His former wife predeceased him. He is survived by their two daughters.

Stefan Buzás, architect, was born on January 16, 1915. He died on October 2, 2008, aged 93