Our first four editions of Anatomy of a House have covered International Modernism (High and Over, Willow Road), early Brutalism (Sugden House) and Romantic Pragmatism (62 Camden Mews). This time we shoot forward to the late 80s/early 90s and the era of High Tech and Postmodernism. Nicholas Grimshaw studied at the Architectural Association, mixing with Peter Cook, Cedric Price and John Winter. After leaving he went into practice with Terry Farrell, designing houses, apartments and factories. One of their most notable designs was 125 Park Road, an apartment block overlooking Regents Park with flexibly planned interiors and an aluminium-clad facade, now Grade II listed. The partners went their separate ways in 1980, Farrell producing more postmodernist designs, with Grimshaw sticking to the High Tech path. 

Erno Goldfinger is better known these days for his post war estates designed for the G.L.C; the brutalist monsters of Trellick Tower and the Balfron estate, now polished and gentrified to within an inch of their lives. However, the building which brought him to the attention of both the architectural and wider worlds was a terrace of three houses in Hampstead, middle one for himself and his wife, Ursula. Goldfinger was born in 1902 in Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied architecture in Paris from 1921, and was taken under the wing of Auguste Perrett, a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete. Perrett had also been mentor to Le Corbusier at the start of the century and it was Corb who recommended Perrett to Goldfinger.

The plans were rejected not just by the council but by much of the local population, including politician Henry Brooke, who would go on to be MP for Hampstead and Home Secretary. It is often reported that James Bond author Ian Fleming was another opponent of Goldfinger’s designs, and named his famous villain after Erno as some kind of revenge. The truth is that the character is named after him (Fleming was friends with Ursula’s cousin, John Blackwell, and heard the name through him), but merely because Fleming liked it as a name and not for any architectural reasons. Of course, Erno did not approve of this representation, and after an exchange of letters with the publishers, a note to the book was added stressing the fact that all characters were entirely fictional. ​

The Goldfingers appealed against Hampstead Borough Council's decision to London County Council, and with the help of the Hampstead Society, won. Goldfinger had pointed to the fact that his house would be a modern representation of the brick Georgian terrace, rather than white walled modernist house as seen elsewhere in the area, most notably at 66 Frognal by Connell, Ward & Lucas and The Sun House by Maxwell Fry. Goldfinger produced the design for houses with Gerald Flower,  who he had worked with on a house in Broxted, Essex and Ralph Tubbs. The structure of the house is formed by a reinforced concrete frame with a facing of red brick. The north facing street facade has a strong horizontal emphasis, with its long projecting window strip, which stretches across the three homes.