Anatomy of a House No.26: New Ways, Northampton

Anatomy of a House No.26

New Ways, Northampton
1926
Peter Behrens

The garden facade of New Ways, Northampton. Image from Architects Journal.

Over the course of our previous twenty five editions of Anatomy of a House, we have explored a range of modernist homes. We began with the splendid International Style villa High and Over by Amyas Connell, and have moved onto art deco outfits of Tudor palaces, brutalist temples in Hampstead, High Tech dwellings in Camden and much more besides. But all those had to start somewhere, and that place is generally acknowledged to have been a modest house on a suburban road in Northampton. The house is known as New Ways, and it is widely considered to be the first modernist house in the country. It was designed by the German architect Peter Behrens for businessman Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke.

Bassett-Lowke founded the eponymous company in 1898, specialising in manufacturing model kits of railways, boats, ships and construction sets. He was born in Northampton in 1877, and in 1916 bought a house at 78 Derngate, in the centre of the town, a Georgian-era townhouse. He then commissioned Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh to remodel it. Mackintosh had come to fame with his designs in Scotland, including offices for newspapers The Daily Record and The Glasgow Herald and Hill House in Helensburgh. At Derngate, Mackintosh added a rear extension and completely remodeled the interior. Ten years after this was completed Bassett-Lowke and his wife Florence had a new house built further out from the town centre. ​

The front of New Ways. Image from Conway.

The architect he chose to design his new house was Peter Behrens, who was known at the time for his industrial designs, such as the AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin from 1909, and for a range of products made by the company ranging from clocks to lights to kettles. Behrens was born in Hamburg in 1868, and became a founder member of the German Werkbund in 1907, an organization that sought to bring high standards of design to mass produced goods. By the time he was commissioned by Bassett-Lowke he had designed a number of houses, all in Germany, but none in the pared down manner he would bring to Northampton. After his only building in Britain, he would go on to design more right angled modernist domestic buildings, like his apartments on the Wesseinhof estate in Stuttgart (1925-27) and houses in Berlin and Kromberg im Taus. 

Peter Behrens' sketch for the front door of New Ways. Image from RIBApix.

Peter Behrens' sketch for the living room of New Ways. Image from RIBApix.

Behrens design for New Ways is fairly straightforward, with an almost square plan for the two storey house. It sits at the front of the typical long, thin suburban plot, close to Wellingborough Road. It was built in brick and finished in a white washed cement render, with concrete construction being rarely used for domestic buildings at this point. The front is enlivened by a pointed window bay that rises vertically above the entrance, with a date sign on top reading 1926. Below the window, and above the centrally-placed art deco double entrance door is a canopy with small pylons. The pylons placed above the date sign originally lit up at night. The ground floor has two windows either side of the door, but there are none on the first floor, a rare sight on an English house. Around the roofline is a crested parapet, with two square chimneys set back to the rear.  

Some of the fittings designed by C.R. Mackintosh for 78 Derngate and moved to New Ways. Image from 78 Derngate.

The garden front is more expressive than the street side, with rectangular windows for both ground and first floors, a recessed balcony area on the first floor and a staircase down to the garden from the ground floor. Inside the expressionist style, only hinted at outside, is given fuller reign. The entrance hallway floor has an irregular geometric pattern in tile, and elsewhere there are triangular light shades, cubist mosaic windows and Bauhaus-influenced rugs. There are also some pieces designed by Mackintosh for 78 Derngate that were transferred over by  Bassett-Lowke when New Ways was completed in June 1926. These include a hanging light fixture, a radiator cover in lead and glass, a cabinet with an inbuilt clock and walls stencils, all placed in the study of the new house. 

New Ways featured on the front cover of Ideal House in 1927. Image from 78 Derngate.

Although there was not an explosion of new modernist houses built in the wake of New Ways, it did prove to be influential for those that did dare bring the contemporary to their designs. Scottish architect Thomas S. Tait used a similar design for one of his houses at Silver End, Essex in 1927, using a very similar front facade complete with a triangular window topped with small pylons and a windowless first floor. The rear face of New Ways also influenced the design of Starlock in Rye, East Sussex, designed in 1930 by Frank Scarlett, who used it for the front of this house. Due to its importance in the history of modern architecture in Britain, New Ways was listed in 1952. Unlike many modernist architects in Germany in the 1930s, Behrens remained in the country after the Nazis took power in 1933. In fact in 1936 he moved from Vienna to Berlin to teach at the state arts academy, the Prussian Academy of Arts, and was chosen by Albert Speer to plan the rebuilding of Berlin. However, he did not live to carry this out and died on 27th February 1940. Bassett-Lowke continued to live at New Ways until his own death on 21st October 1953.