Corder House was built for a local drapery firm called Corder's, owned by Alexander Corder, and it was meant to advertise the business as much as house it. Four storeys high including the attic, it presents a ground floor of panelled fascia and arcaded frieze, with projecting canted bays on the first floor flanked by narrow lights with Gothic capitals. The second floor has a central balustraded balcony with panels carrying Gothic letters - presumably the Corder family name picked out in stone. The curvilinear windows with paired arcaded top lights have shallow canted centres beneath balustraded attic balconies. The dates 1856 and 1889 appear in panels at eaves level. The earlier date marks the founding of the drapery; the later, the commissioning of this building.

Sydenham House stands immediately alongside, also four storeys tall, built as a planned counterpart rather than a separate commission. Its ground floor carries a moulded fascia and frieze under a full-width balcony with a stone balustrade. First-floor windows are tripartite in the centre and paired in the outer bays, with upper glazing bars in curvilinear heads beneath swags and a second-floor balcony that projects in the centre. The square-headed second-floor lights have raised arches with pendants. The central attic gable carries a raised segmental pediment over an eclectic tracery of a wide arched light containing smaller cusped lights. Together the two buildings present as one composition with two voices - the same architect at work in the same key but on different verses.

Frank Caws is the architect to know if you want to read Sunderland's late-Victorian commercial streets. Just a short walk away on the same street stands his Elephant Tea Rooms - a riot of Hindu Gothic and Venetian Gothic in faience and terracotta, with carved elephants and a Buddhist-style conical turret roof. Caws favoured the exotic. He believed that in the age of the British Empire, commercial architecture could and should reach for the visual language of the Mediterranean and South Asia. Corder House and Sydenham House are the more restrained members of his Sunderland portfolio - still extravagant by the standards of a Northumberland market town, still carrying their pointed arches and Gothic letters, but tamed slightly toward the demands of a drapery rather than a tea merchant.

From the air the two buildings are not visible as individual structures - they form part of the continuous Fawcett Street terrace - but the distinctive steeply pitched roofs and the central lantern with its conical cap stand out among the more conventional Victorian roof line. Fawcett Street is one of the few surviving stretches of high Victorian commercial architecture in Sunderland; much of the rest was lost to Second World War bombing and post-war redevelopment. Corder House and Sydenham House have stood through both. The drapery is long gone. The shaped gables and terracotta scrolls remain, doing what Frank Caws designed them to do: catching the eye and refusing to be ordinary.