Anatomy of a House No.27: The Gane Show House

Anatomy of a House No.27
The Gane Show House, Bristol
1936
Marcel Breuer

The Gane Show House (1936) by Marcel Breuer and F.R.S. Yorke. Image from RIBApix.

Like a number of his Bauhaus colleagues, Marcel Breuer briefly worked in Britain in the 1930s, as he fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In his two years in the country, he only designed a handful of buildings, focusing mainly on furniture design. The most well known of his British buildings is the spectacular Sea Lane House in Angmering (1937). But for this edition of Anatomy of A House we will be exploring the Show House he designed for Crofton Gane, the businessman who ran the P.E. Gane furniture company. Like Breuer's time in Britain, the lifespan of the Gane Show House was brief, being demolished shortly after the end of the 1936 Royal Agricultural Show for which it was built.

Sea Lane House (1936) Marcel Breuer and F.R.S. Yorke. Image from RIBApix.

Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 in Pecs, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After studying art in Vienna, he entered the Bauhaus in 1920, chiefly to study furniture design. He graduated in 1924, and after a brief spell working in Paris,he returned to become the head of the joinery workshop at the Bauhaus, leaving again in 1928 to practice as an architect in Berlin. He designed a number of houses and flats, as well as continuing his furniture design, and moved between Zurich and Budapest. In 1935 he explored moving to Britain, as his former colleague Walter Gropius had already done, and arrived in the country in October. Breuer moved into Wells Coates’ Isokon flats and like other emigre architects, went into practice with a young British modernist, in this case F.R.S. Yorke. 

Furniture designed by Marcel Breuer at 24 Downs Park West. Image from RIBApix.

Alongside the handful of buildings he designed with Yorke, Breuer also produced furniture for Jack Pritchard's Isokon Furniture Company, like his now iconic Long Chair. The houses he designed with Yorke include the stunning Sea Lane house, (which was never occupied by its owner James Mcnabb due to World War II), a pair of brick houses for Eton College and a house in Lee-on-Solent, now altered and extended. Through Pritchard, Breuer met another furniture manufacturer, Crofton Gane, who was keen to move the focus of modernist design in Britain away from London, towards Bristol and the south west. Initially, Gane asked Breuer and his partner Yorke to remodel his house at 24 Downs Park West, modernising the interior and adding a large ground floor window. The new interior included what was reputed to be the first open metal tread staircase in the country.

A plan of the Gane Show House.

Gane’s next commission for Breuer and Yorke was for a show house for the Bristol Royal Show, to be held between 30th June-4 July 1936. The show house was intended to showcase not just Gane’s modern furniture but a "Design for Living" incorporating furniture, fittings and layout. This modernity was not broadcast through the use of gleaming white walls, nautical trimmings like metal railings or monolithic concrete, as was so often the case for the 1930s modernist house, but through a palette of Cotswold stone walls, plate glass and birch. The single storey house was arranged in an irregular plan with only two exterior walls meeting at 45 degrees, with the southerly facade formed of a concave curve. On one side there was a covered terrace and a pergola providing a shaded area in the garden. Inside there was only one short supporting wall, with the emphasis on the spaces flowing into each other. The rooms, such that they were, consisted of a main bedroom, a children's bedroom, a living room and a study. Being a temporary show house, there was seemingly no need for details like a kitchen, bathrooms or a laundry!  

The interior of the Gane Show house, featuring furniture designed by Breuer.

Of course this lack of hard detail was mainly down to the fact that it was less a house and more of a temporary furniture showroom, home to a number of prototype designs by Breuer himself and by Gane’s in-house designers. Unfortunately the five day event was something of a washout with a typical English summer weather of pouring rain, leading to no sales for the manufacturer. However Gane and breuer were both proud of what they had created together, with the architect apparently naming the show house as one of his favourite buildings that he had designs, alongside the UNESCO building in Paris of 1958. 

Breuer only stayed in Britain for one more year, following his former Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius to the US in 1937, to teach at Harvard. He also worked in partnership with Gropius for a few years before going to work solo. He retired in 1976, passing away 5 years later. Gane’s furniture company closed in 1954, after which he established The Gane Trust, dedicated to supporting artists and crafts people in the south West of England and South Wales, which still operates today.