The Great Game, as Lutyens called it, is being played again in Piccadilly and for high stakes. One of England’s leading contemporary classicists, Robert Adam, has designed an eyecatching corner block between Wren’s St James’s Church and Waterstone’s, the suave modern store designed in 1935 by Joseph Emberton for Simpson’s. Adam’s design is Classicism with an engaging touch of the Behemoths — more Greek Thomson of Glasgow than Lutyens.

He describes it as a “columnar display”, which echoes the theme of other Piccadilly building fronts including Norman Shaw’s grandiloquent hotel opposite and the front of the Royal Institute of Watercolorists (now Bafta) to the west.

Adam is delighted that Westminster planning committee approved it instantly, overriding officers’ recommendations for a refusal. “They wanted all three facades faced in stone but the members took my point that the flank should be in brick to match Wren’s church,” he says.

A century ago the Great Game involved adapting the classical Orders of Architecture — Doric, Ionic Corinthian — to façades with ever more stories. This has eight. Adam plays the game with both major and minor orders which have their own invented capitals adorned with the faces of Courage (Audax) and Clemency below. Handsomely cast in bronze, they are by the sculptor Sandy Stoddard, who worked with John Simpson on the new Queen’s Gallery. Pillars of red polished granite from China frame the shopfront openings with a generous frieze, allowing for shop names and logos.

Adam’s detail may be on the chunky side but it works because it is done with exuberance. He is having fun stretching the classical vocabulary just as the Victorian and Baroque architects did. For the upper windows he uses a dwarf column with chamfered sides extremely similar to the Greek Thomson office buildings in Glasgow. There are outsize urns on the parapet alternating with large dormers surmounted by Grecian anthemions, each carved from a single piece of pale grey Chinese granite.

Adam’s most original trick? Adopting a chameleon-like technique with each corner as it turns round to Jermyn Street so that the fronts subtly metamorphose to match the buildings opposite. Thus the brick flank facing the church is sprinkled with darker header bricks to match Wren’s work. In Jermyn Street the modelling becomes flatter and more Soanian, with incised mouldings rather than projecting ones. In place of the main cornice he introduces a bay leaf Torus (roll) moulding executed in copper.

One of the best features of Victorian and Edwardian commercial architecture was the use of bold corner motifs — dome, spires, turrets and bay windows. Adam crowns his Piccadilly corner with a circular tempietto — a ring of smooth Ionic columns inset with frameless glass windows which increase the transparency.

Adam’s design also pays a neat homage to Simpson’s by continuing the design of the window ledges.

On the roof Adam has set an Egyptian colonnade with silvery palm leaf capitals, neatly shielding the plant room. This opens on to a terrace offering sensational space for corporate entertaining, with views across the rooftops to Buckingham Palace.

Adam’s trump card is that the building has cost no more than any other top-of-the-range office block. He explains: “People say it will be expensive and that you can’t get the craftsmen, but that’s not true. It’s clad in real stone, Portland, and was built without scaffolding. The panels were simply craned into position.”

Often this type of construction results in ugly “expansion” joints — or zip-fasteners, as Adam calls them. His solution?To conceal the joints in the voussoirs over the windows. “We spray them with stone dust so you don’t see them,” he laughs.

The big battle was to ensure the design was completed as he intended, and not diluted for economic reasons. “We had to fight over every stone. If the job had been given to an executive architect, as developers often do to save on fees, the whole finesse would have been lost.” As it is, Adam calculates that he saved his client half a million pounds in “value engineering” by achieving economies in construction and the use of materials through thoughtful design. “That’s £50,000 off our fees too,” he muses.

We haven’t seen street architecture like this since a young American in the Rolfe Judd practice designed classical facades full of movement in the 1980s, notably a sinuous wave-fronted facade in Park Place next to Brooks’s Club in St James’s. A lively architectural scene depends on a choice of styles. At a time when Modernism-Minimalism is making all the running, Adam is providing it.