Anatomy of a House No.21: 78 South Hill Park

Anatomy of a House No.21

78 South Hill Park, Hampstead
1964 
Brian Housden

We have previously explored Ted Cullinan’s self-built house in Camden Mews from 1963, in an area where many architects designed and built their own homes. This edition of Anatomy of a House covers another self-designed house in the borough, the striking 78 South Hill Park by Brian Housden. South Hill Park is a residential street just to the south of Hampstead Heath, laid out in the late 19th century in a tennis racquet shape, with large Victorian-era houses.  An area on the west side of the loop of the street was hit by a bomb during World War II, and the site was sold for redevelopment. As with the vacant sites in Camden Mews and Murray Mews, the plot on South Hill Park was snapped up by young architects looking to build their own houses. Nos. 80-90 is a terrace of six houses, designed by Stanley Amis and Bill & Gill Howell from 1956 for themselves and four other families. On the opposite side of the road are two conjoined houses , Nos. 29 and 31, by Michael Brawne and T. Ingersoll, but the most eye-catching is Housden’s brutalist No.78. Erno Goldfinger also produced a design for a house and for an apartment block here in the late 1940s, but the project wasn't built. 

80-90 South Hill Park by Stanley Amis and Bill & Gill Howell. Image from RIBApix.

Nowadays, South Hill Park is a well to do part of Hampstead, but that wasn't the case when the Housden’s found the plot for their house. The original Victorian villas that line the majority of the street had largely been converted into flats at the start of the 20th century, and the street had also become notorious for criminal reasons. Amazingly, the last two women executed in the country, Styllou Christophi and Ruth Ellis, both committed their murders on South Hill Park. 

Rietveld Schroder House (1924) by Truus Schroder-Schrader and Gerrit Rietveld. Image from Conway.

Brian Housden was born in 1928, and studied at the Architectural Association at the beginning of the 1950s. Brian and his wife Margaret began searching for a plot to build their own home in north London, eventually buying a small piece of land from John Killick (future partner of Stanley Amis and Bill Howell in the HKPA partnership) in 1958. It would take another six years before the Housden’s moved into the still-uncompleted No.78, with Brian rethinking his early designs after a trip to the Netherlands were they saw the 1924 Rietveld Schroder House, designed in 1924 by Truus Schroder-Schrader and Gerrit Rietveld, also meeting the architects themselves. 
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On the same trip, the Housdens also met architect Aldo Van Eyck, known for his Structuralist designs, such as Amstrdam Orphanage of 1960, which was designed with spaces that mirror the different ages of its residents and a mixture of facilities that make it into a mini city. Housden’s design for his new house was also influenced by the Maison de Verre house in Paris by Pierre Chareau, Bernard Bijvoet and Dalbert from 1932, with its use of glass blocks and exposed services and structural elements. 

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The rear of 78 South Hill Park.

The house as Housden finally designed it sits two and half storeys tall on South Hill Park, between the terrace of Amis and Howell houses and Alexander Gibson’s 1949 house at No.76. The facade is a riot of projecting and receding forms, with its concrete frame and canopies offset by the Nevada glass lenses which make up most of the wall space. The lenses are set into concrete frames reinforced by aluminum, and allow a diffused light into the interior, providing both illumination and privacy. The rest of the structure is formed of hollow clinker concrete blockwork and narrow Crittall windows. Glass blocks were used for rooflights, which provide illumination from the top of the internal staircase. The staircase itself is formed from reinforced concrete, separate from the main frame of the house, and rises through the building. Inside, the main living area is arranged over the lower ground floor with an open plan kitchen, a sunken dining area and living room. Above this is the ground floor with office space for two people. The house has four bedrooms, with the master bedroom having an extra high ceiling of 12 feet, the other three bedrooms have ceilings of 8 feet. 

The monolithic concrete staircase at 78 South Hill Park. Image from Wallpaper.

Building on the house began in October 1963, with the engineering side overseen by Danish engineer Nills Lisberg, who had to ensure the structure did not sink into the clay excavated over 100 years previously for the creation of Hampstead Ponds. The Housden’s moved into the unfinished house in 1964, with the fitting out continuing over the next 35 years. The interior of the shuttered concrete structure was generally left unvarnished, with a circular ceiling motif repeated in the dining area, master bedroom and study area. During their visit to the Netherlands, the Housden’s also acquired a large number of original furniture pieces designed by Gerrit Rietveld, which they used to furnish the house, along with chairs by Charles & Ray Eames. 

Brian Housden at 78 South Hill Park. Image from The Modern House.

Compared to its neighbours at Nos 80-90, the house was seldom mentioned in architectural literature, although it has apparently been compared to a “ruined Japanese town hall”, (possibly Kenzo Tange’s Kurashiki Hall?) and Buildings of England's North London volume remarks it is a “strange brutalist composition”. However, the house has gained somewhat more fame in the digital age being fixture on concrete obsessed social media accounts (guilty!). No. 78 was Grade II listed in November 2014, with the listing notes calling it “a completely unique piece of architectural vision and ingenuity”. Brian Housden passed the same year and the house was finally sold by the family in 2018. 

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References

Volume 4: Post War Houses Twentoeth Century Architecture  2020
Buildings of England: London North
Historic England Listing Entry