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Anatomy of a House No.7- St Raphael, Hornchurch

30/1/2023

Anatomy of a House No.7

St Raphael, Hornchurch, Havering
1933
Stewart Lloyd Thomson

All the houses we have covered so far in our Anatomy of a House blog have been designed by famous architects, and are now listed and preserved for future generations to admire. The next house is none of those things. Nowadays, if you were wandering down Nelmes Way in Hornchurch you would probably not even give this house a second glance, committed modernist that you are, wandering off in search of the next flat roofed wonder. But had you been walking the same road in 1933, you may well have stopped in astonishment and wonder. These days, St Raphael looks like any other detached suburban home, but when first built it was the essence of forward looking modernity.

It was designed by Australian architect Stewart Lloyd Thomson, who was involved with one of the first modernist houses in the country, and subject of our first Anatomy, High and Over in Amersham. He was born in Melbourne in 1902, moving to Britain in the early 1920s to finish his architectural training. He worked for Southern Railways before briefly working with Amyas Connell on High and Over. A couple of years later Thomson got the commission to design a house for Mr & Mrs Hill in Hornchurch, then in the county of Essex and part of Hornchurch Urban District.

Thomson designed the house to be constructed with a concrete frame, an early example of this method of construction for small domestic projects in Britain (alongside previous AOAH subjects High & Over and Torilla, Nast Hyde). The frame was infilled with brick and covered in pale cream render. The windows were metal framed and there were wrought iron railings around the first floor deck and second floor sun garden. The house had an integrated garage, and iron gates with a striking De Stijl-inspired design. The garden also had a greenhouse, complete with a curved concrete entrance.

Inside the design continued the exterior’s forward-looking aesthetic. The walls were painted in peach, with a pink-brown carpet and silver rubber curtains. The hallway featured a large mirror, expanding the space through illusion. The light fittings were oval shaped trough lights which projected illumination evenly around each room. The ground floor was designed with an open plan living and dining room and a kitchen. The first floor contained four bedrooms, with one having access to the front deck area and a rectangular staircase tower leading up to the roof top sun garden. The oval pattern was continued out in the garden where an oval path led a route around the greenery.

What a futuristic wonder the house must have seemed on completion! In a street of Rob Roy, this house would have been Dan Dare. Unfortunately, all we have now is the wonderful photos from the September 1934 edition of Ideal House. At some point, prior to 1990, the house was converted into an ordinary looking residence. The plan of the house is still somewhat intact, but the flat roof and sun decks have disappeared beneath a tiled, pitched roof, the curved entrance porch has been subsumed beneath an extension, the concrete premier walls and iron gate swapped for a large crazy paving driveway and the half moon garden entrance has been replaced with a conservatory.

The 1933 version of the house garnered much publicity in the architectural press, with lavish descriptions of its construction and its interior finishings. But this didn't seem to lead to fame and riches for Thomson. During the rest of the decade he designed an office block in Torquay, another office in Bedford and did some work on shops in London. In the post war period he went into partnership with Greek architect Hector Corfiato, working on the Notre Dame de France Church in Leicester Square together. Corfiato had taught Amyas Connell when at the Bartlett School, which Thomson also attended, so it can be assumed that they also met there. Thomson later taught himself at University College London between 1955 and 1960. Thomson died in 1990.

There is some (slight) good news however. A copy of St Raphael still exists at the other end of the country in Inverness. The house, Lamburn 41 Old Edinburgh Road, was ‘designed’ by R. Carruthers-Ballantyne who seemingly had seen some of the copious press coverage of St Raphael and used the design himself. This kind of plagiarism happened at the start of the 20th century when architects could see other projects in the press but probably thought their copies wouldn't be noted. Other houses that were copied include Oliver Hill’s Frinton Park estate designs, Evelyn Simmons ‘Sunway’ house from the 1934 Ideal Home Exhibition and FRS Yorke’s 1936 house in Iver, Bucks. From a 21st century perspective, we should be glad that the copies were built as quite often the original was altered (as with St Raphael) or demolished altogether.

References
Ideal Home magazine September 1934
R. Randall Phillips- Houses for Moderate Means Country Life 1936
H. Myles Wright- Small Houses 500-2,500 pounds The Architectural Press 1937

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Anatomy of a House No.6- Torilla, Nast Hyde

29/11/2022

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Anatomy of a House No.6

Torilla, Nast Hyde, Hertfordshire 1935
F.R.S. Yorke

F.R.S Yorke was one of the primary promoters of modernist architecture in Britain in the 1930s. As well as his architectural work, first in partnership with his father then with Bauhaus great Marcel Breur, Yorke wrote for the Architects Journal and produced his Modern House series of books. The first edition of The Modern House was published in 1934, mixing examples of the finest modernist homes from Europe and America, with some from Britain, which was still testing its toe in the water of modernism at this point. By 1937, this had improved enough to be able to publish The Modern House in England, featuring an array of modernist dwellings, divided into four categories according to building material; brick and stone, timber frame and concrete.

Torilla, Nast Hyde, Herts (1935) by FRS Yorke

One of the houses in the concrete section was a house he designed at Nast Hyde, near Hatfield in Hertfordshire. It was commissioned by Christobel Burton for her daughter Barbara MacDonald. Christobel was the daughter of Christabel Rose Harmsworth Burton, who lived at Great Nast Hyde, an Elizabethan country house, and the new house was to be built in a portion of the grounds. Christobel apparently met FRS Yorke on a skiing holiday.

Torilla under construction

Plan of Torilla's ground floor and garden

The house is formed of reinforced concrete, with walls of 4in and 6in thickness, and concrete slabs for the floor and roof. The house is mostly single storey, except for the living room area which is double height. The master bedroom suite has a roof terrace, with a bathroom and children's play area next door. The interior flooring was finished in a combination of maple, terrazzo tiles and cork carpet tiles. The living area is large and open plan with clerestory windows, and contains the red-painted staircase to the roof terrace, and a dramatic, monolithic fireplace. The house was well received and documented in the architectural press of the day, notable for being one of the first houses built in monolithic concrete. Yorke and his now partner Marcel Breuer, were asked to add an extension to Torilla a year later.

The living room of Torilla with monolithic fireplace. Image from RIBApix

Yorke and Breuer would only work together for 2 years, but in that time they designed a number of houses. For the furniture manufacture P.E. Gane they designed a show house, consisting of walls built from local stone and glass with a flat roof. The house also had inbuilt plywood furniture. It was later demolished. They also built a sequel to Torilla, this time in Hampshire for H.A. Rose. It has been altered and extended, but still survives today, as an old people's home. Yorke and Breuer would also design a pair of brick Masters houses for Eton college, as well as the spectacular Sea Lane House in West Sussex.

Shangri-La, Lee-on-Solent (1937) by Yorke and Breuer

Sea Lane House, West Sussex (1937) by Yorke & Breuer

Barbara MacDonald lived at Torilla until 1939, when the family moved to New Zealand. Barbara’s mother then moved out of Great Nast Hyde and into the modernist house. After German air raids on RAF Hatfield got too close for comfort, the Air Force took over the house until 1945. Christobel moved to Codicote, where she once again commissioned Yorke to design a house, this time an experimental concrete box-framed home. The house is still there but altered and extended. It should also be noted that one of Christobel’s grandsons was the architect Richard Burton, later of Ahrends Burton & Koralek

As with many early concrete houses in Britain, the construction of Torilla was faulty and water ingress caused damage to the structure. It was listed in 1983 but then delisted a year later when an application to demolish it was made. It was allowed to deteriorate further until in the mid 1990s, when Amerigo Brusini bought the house and proposed to demolish it. It was instantly relisted by English Heritage and a successful campaign to save it was launched, after which architect John Winter restored Torilla back to its original glory, as it remains to this day.

References

James Bettley, Nikolaus Pevsner, Bridget Cherry: Buildings of England- Hertfordshire
FRS Yorke: The Modern House in England
Alan Powers: Modern- The Modern Movement in Britain
Jeremy Gould: Modern Houses in Britain 1919-39
Historic England Listing

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Streamline in the Suburbs

16/10/2022

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To celebrate the launch of our new mini guide; Speculative Suburban Houses 1928-38, we have a guest blog from Joe Mathieson on the Suntrap house, the developers response to art deco and modernism in the 1930s.

Roger Malcolm of Edgware' brochure for new houses, 1935. Image from the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture Collection.

If you were looking for a new home in outer London in the mid-1930s, you might have come across an advert for the developer Thomas Currey’s Willow Road Estate in Enfield. Designed as ’new world homes in an orchard setting’, they were built near ‘open country’ and yet ‘just outside the town’. Metroland, the piecemeal interwar suburban development programme, had sprawled eastward, far beyond its origin in West London, to find itself around the corner from Enfield Town station. The houses of Willow Road were suntrap houses.

The suntrap house is a domestic typology found across London originating in the early 1930s. Characterised by a bay window with curved steel units that ‘trap the sun’, it is generally a semi-detached building with a traditional pitched roof. The suntrap represented a tentative modernist offshoot of a speculative house building tendency that specialised in the mock-Tudor or ‘Jacobethan' styles. Like those particular brands of revivalism, the suntrap catered towards well-to-do working class and lower middle-class families aspiring to a house of their own.

Suntraps are found all across North London - Gidea Park, Belsize Park, Cockfosters, Edgware, Oakwood, Pinner, Clay Hill and Hampstead Garden Suburb. At the same time, they have been dismissed as a minor footnote in interwar architectural history, typifying an architectural compromise that pleased few. But suntraps are a thing of beauty. They also throw up thought-provoking questions of authorship, mass production and popular taste within twentieth century British architectural culture.

The Coronation and Jubilee house designs, presented at the 1935 Ideal Home Exhibtion by the John Laing building company. Image from Enfield Archives.

Form

Suntraps generally contain bay windows over two floors with Crittall units that curve on either side of the adjoining front bays. Roofs are traditionally hipped, with shared chimneys to the party wall. While typically coated in white render, often they contain brick side elevations or ground floor brick frontages. The concrete door canopy very often reflects the moderne curves of the glass, while the door will usually be heavily glazed with a ‘sunburst’ symbol. Some suntrap houses still have chevron motifs in their windows, a hallmark of the Crittall brand.

A typical suntrap’s scale is similar to many of the mock-Tudor builds whose streets they share. The hall was designed wider than in most pre-war houses, allowing staircases to be brought forward to the door. They would have had separate dining and living rooms on the ground floor. The decreasing fashion of servants in the interwar period, alongside the clientele that the suntrap was expected to attract, meant that the kitchens were almost always integrated into the main house unlike in previous eras. On the second floor would be two or three bedrooms.

Suntraps came loaded with all mod cons - electricity, hot water, and a flushing toilet. The sweeping windows would absorb sunlight in an age where sun rays were widely seen to be therapeutic and health-giving. With a driveway fit for one or two motorcars, they perfectly encapsulated the aspirations and necessities of Metroland.

Old Rectory Gardens, Edgware (1928-32) by Welch, Cachemaille-Day & Lander. Image from RIBApix.

Authorship

A handful of architectural firms designed suntrap houses. The key partnership for their evolution was Welch, Cachemaille-Day and Lander, comprising Herbert Welch (1884-1953), N. F. Cachemaille-Day (1896-1976) and Felix Lander (1898-1960). It was likely Welch that led the initiative in these designs. He worked on the first set of suntraps at Old Rectory Gardens, Edgware in 1932, in partnership with the developer Roger Malcolm. C. M. Crickmer (1879-1971) followed Welch’s lead, developing them around the middle of the decade. G. G. Winbourne (1892-1947) developed suntraps into groupings more fitting to southern Europe, with flat roofs and balconies.

The suntrap was a reproducible type to which minor alterations could be made depending on the client, or, as was more often the case, their predicted desires. Architectural drawings could also be made for a particular range of iterations of suntrap and repeated as many times as the plot of land allowed. Such a ‘Universal Plan’ provided the bread and butter work of many architects. Ossulton Way in Hampstead Garden Suburb is one such example. Designed in 1934 by Welch, Cachemaille-Day and Lander, the north side of the close contains detailed plans of the houses labelled types A - E. The outlines of the houses are drawn on the south side but instead of detailing the internals instead read ‘Repeat’ for each letter.

The houses’ ‘identikit’ features made them expedient for speculative builders seeking to forego costly architects’ fees and expedite the overall construction process. Builders who worked on suntraps included Coombs Construction, Morrell’s and Haymills. The architect C. Bertram Parkes noted in the RIBA journal in the mid-1930s that architects were generally ‘not employed when houses of this [semi-detached] type are erected’.

An Osbert Lancaster cartoon depicting the varied interwar design of the imaginary Belvedere Avenue, 1936.

Taste

Suntrap houses have been dismissed as ‘modernistic’ - rushed attempts at modernism proper. In 1942 the critic Anthony Bertram argued they were traditional houses dressed up by builders with a cheap streamlined flourish: ‘bogus modern, as the Tudoristic is bogus Tudor’. For the cartoonist and historian Osbert Lancaster, suntraps represented a ‘nightmare amalgam of elements’ betraying a ‘misunderstanding of the Corbusier-Gropius school’. For these critics the suntraps’ external stylistic blending was often reflected in the interior design choices of their inhabitants, combining contemporary design, of whatever quality, with furniture and fittings from the pre-war era.

The interior and exterior aesthetics of the suntrap in its heyday fits neatly into what poet John Betjeman called Jazz Moderne. Inspired by interwar American pop culture, the phrase evokes glamour and fashion on the one hand; ephemerality and lack of authenticity on the other. The suntrap is seen to encapsulate a fundamental misunderstanding of the lessons of the Machine Age as held by the purist avant-garde. But the label fails to capture the ambitions and dreams of the aspirational suntrap homeowner of the time. For these buyers, the house was something much more (or perhaps much less) than Le Corbusier’s notion of ‘a machine for living in’.

Semi-detached suburban housing, Watford by-pass, Mill-Hill, 1940. Image from RIBApix.

Legacy

Developer-driven suburbs were condemned at the international modernist congress CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) in the mid-1930s as an ‘urbanist folly’; ’squalid antechamber[s] of the city’. Today such sentiments have lost some of their edge. Interwar suburbs are the backdrop of daily life for countless citizens. Three million houses were built around the suburbs during the interwar period, the majority of them in London. The average semi-detached, suntrap or otherwise, is as aspirational now as then.

Situated among the suburbs’ vast expanses, suntraps represent a dalliance with modernism that contrasts nicely with their more conservative counterparts. But their ‘jazz’ inclinations also remind us that not all modernist architecture is pure and ‘true to its age’. Much of it was profit-seeking, stylistically awkward, and - yes - populist.

Suntraps are relatively unprotected entities from a conservation standpoint. They are often the victims of unsightly extensions and refurbishment work - oversized dormer windows, unsympathetic render, and most notably, window replacements in uPVC plastic that omit the unique curve of their bays. A greater recognition of the suntrap might go some way to persuading people to preserve them, and to celebrate their oddity as houses both attractive and unpretentious.

Joe Mathieson is the Architectural Support Officer at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust, and a Twentieth Century Society volunteer

Speculative Suburban Houses 1928-38 is the third in our series of Mini Guides, each exploring the modernist buildings of a particular location or architect. Mini Guide No.3 surveys the speculative suburban house of the 1930s, when developers used art deco and modernism to sell houses to the masses. Get your copy HERE

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Anatomy of a House No.5- Grand Union Walk

28/9/2022

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Anatomy of a House No.5

Grand Union Walk, Camden Town
1990
Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners

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.

125 Park Road by Farrell/Grimshaw Partnership. Image from Grimshaw Architects.

The supermarket company J. Sainsbury acquired a stretch of industrial land next to the Grand Union Canal in Camden Town at the start of the 1980s, which they wanted to develop into a large superstore. Part of the site was occupied by the 1930s Aerated Bread Company factory, which had ceased prosecution in 1982. Sainsbury’s initially awarded the scheme to Scott Brownrigg and Turner, before the decision was reversed by its newly established planning committee, headed by architectural critic Colin Avery. The project was given to Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners in November 1985, with planning permission granted for the whole scheme in May 1986.

Sainsbury's Superstore, Camden Town by Nicholas Grimshaw. Image from Grimshaw Architects.

Camden council originally stipulated that the housing should take the form of flats, but Grimshaw thought the site better suited to a terrace of 10 houses with 1 maisonette and 1 bedsit flat. The houses face north, overlooking the canal, with their entrance via a private walkway on the canalside. The facade on the supermarket side has no windows, which meant there would be no natural light for most of the day in the houses. To alleviate this, Grimshaw made the north facing windows double height and added circular top lights to the roofs. The houses are constructed of concrete blockwork and precast concrete floors. The canalside exteriors have curved aluminium walls, reminiscent of an aeroplane fuselage, with lozenge shaped windows.

Isometric Drawing of a section of the Grand Union Walk terrace.

Inside, the double height vertical windows let light into an open plan living space on the first floor which opens onto a balcony. The windows feature electrically controlled aluminium blinds allowing residents privacy and shade. There are bedrooms on the second floor and the ground floor, which also features a utility room. The kitchen is situated on the first floor at the rear of the open plan living space with a lounge overlooking the canal. The interior is finished in white render, with beech wood used for the doors, stairs and floor. Roof terraces were added to the houses in 2006.

The Living Room of the Grand Union Walk Houses

The houses were a success, garnering critical praise from architecture critic Martin Pawley, who called them “houses of a new age”, and selling quickly. The owners of the new houses were given instruction manuals, detailing how to use the various high tech features and where to find qualified servicers and suppliers. In 2018 the developer Sellar submitted an application to demolish part of the wider complex (not the houses) and build a four storey block of flats for affordable housing. The 20th Century Society submitted an application for listing for the whole Grimshaw-designed site in early 2019. Historic England listed the supermarket and the Grand Union houses at Grade II in July, They did not list the offices, workshops or creche part of the scheme, leaving them open to redevelopment in the future. However, the prospects of the houses seem to be assured with their listing and general popularity, hopefully they will remain as they are, a slice of unexpected futurism on the canalside.

References

Colin Rowe- Architecture, Industry and Innovation: v2: Work of Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners 1965-88

Historic England Listing

Grimshaw Architects Website

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Anatomy of a House No.4- Willow Road

4/9/2022

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1-3 Willow Road, Hampstead
1938-9
Erno Goldfinger

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.

Design for 1-3 Willow Road (1938) from Robert Elwall: Erno Goldfinger Drawings

Goldfinger met Ursula Blackwell, heiress to the Crosse & Blackwell food company, in Paris in 1930 and they married in 1933. They moved to London in 1934, living in St Johns Wood and then at Lubetkin & Tecton’s Highpoint I flats in Highgate. They wanted to build their own house, and found a terraced cottage in Willow Road, Hampstead for sale. The Goldfingers bought that house and its three neighbours, in order to knock them down and use the large plot. Their first plan was for a small block of flats, reflecting the contemporary modernist spirit seen at the Isokon and Highpoint apartments. That was rejected, and Goldfinger drew up plans for a terrace of three houses, taking inspiration for the form from the neighbouring Georgian terraces.

Sketch for interior of 3 Willow Road (1938) from Robert Elwall: Erno Goldfinger Drawings

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.

Floorplans for 2 Willow Road (1939) from Robert Elwall: Erno Goldfinger Drawings

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.

Staircase at 2 Willow Road. Photograph by Erno Goldfinger. Image from Architectural Association.

The terrace is four storeys high, appearing as three from the street side with the lower ground floor opening up onto the garden. The plan for each house is different, with some similarities. The ground floors have integrated garages, alongside a kitchen and maids quarters. A spiral staircase grows out of the concrete frame, connecting the floors, and alongside the outer walls, is the only fixed part of the house, with interior walls designed to be rearranged to create more space. The first floor of No.2 features a dining area, study, studio and living room. The first floors of Nos.1 and 3 are slightly smaller with a bedroom and living room. The living area of the Goldfingers house is finished in oak panelling and features furniture designed by Erno as well as a wide collection of 20th century art with works by Eduardo Paolozzi, Bridget Riley, Henry Moore and others.

The Goldfingers lived at 2 Willow Road for the rest of their lives, (apart from a brief stay at Balfron Tower in 1972), with Erno dying in 1987 and Ursula four years later. The house was acquired by the National Trust in 1994 and restored by Avanti Architects. It is now open to the public, completing its journey from scandal to national treasure in just over 50 years. Numbers 1 and 3 are still in private ownership.

References

Historic England Listing

FRS Yorke: The Modern House in England 1944

Miranda Newton: Architects London Houses

James Dunnett and Gavin Stamp: Erno Goldfinger Works

Robert Elwall: Erno Goldfinger Drawings

Mate Major: Erno Goldfnger

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Anatomy of a House No.3- 62 Camden Mews

10/7/2022

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62 Camden Mews, NW1
1962-64
Edward Cullinan

Edward ‘Ted’ Cullinan was born into an upper middle class family in 1931, growing up in Hampstead and Regents Park. His father was Doctor and his mother an artist. After being evacuated to Canada during World War II, he returned to Britain, attending Ampleforth College, then Cambridge, before attending the Architectural Association, where he had Denys Lasdun and Peter Smithson as tutors among others. After a fellowship at UC Berkeley, he returned again to the UK to work for Lasdun, assisting on the University of East Anglia project with its dramatic ziggurat student residences and the Royal College of Physicians. In the early 1960s he founded Edward Cullinan Architects, beginning his practice with a number of small handbuilt projects.

Studio House, Steep, Hampshire (1960)

One of those projects was a house for himself and his family at 62 Camden Mews, Camden Town. Cullinan had already built two houses before building his own; a studio house in Steep, Hampshire (1960) for his uncle, Lord Horder, and the Marvin House in California for his friends Mariah and Stephen Marvin. Cullinan found and purchased an empty lot on Camden Mews in 1960 for £2000. He designed a house facing south with an open plan living area on the first floor, with windows angled to maximize sunlight through the day, but also provide shade in high summer. Bedrooms were placed on the ground floor, with the letter box emptying into the main bedroom, an idea that allows the Sunday newspaper to be delivered directly to bed! The two floors are connected by an external staircase via a terrace on the garage roof, and a smaller internal spiral staircase.

Design for 62 Camden Mews by Ted Cullinan. The figure walking up the stairs on the right hand side is Jim Stirling.

The materials used to build the house were a mixture of timber, brick and concrete, bought , borrowed and stolen (or at least reclaimed). For example the blue engineering bricks used in the courtyard area were rejected materials from the Royal College of Physicians project by Denys Lasdun, during Cullinan's time with him. The main structure is formed of in-situ concrete post beams with reclaimed London stock brick infill. The second floor has timber frame, overhanging the first floor, with large horizontal windows on three sides. The house was built between 1962 and 64 by Cullinan with friends and family of a few years, on weekends and when time allowed.

Sketch of 62 Camden Mews showing the angle of sunlight into the house.

The house's design is one of the first examples of what came to be called “Romantic Pragmatism”, a style that combined influences such as Arts and Crafts, and early modern pioneers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolf Schindler, two architects that Cullian explored in America, as well as Japanese design. Designs would be adapted to their surroundings with vernacular materials used in preference to the modernist palette of concrete and glass. Other architects who used similar ideas include Peter Aldington, Richard MacCormac and Fred Pooley, who with his “rationalized traditional” for Bucks County Council.

Kawecki House, 12 Bartholomew Villas, Kentish Town (1964)

After Camden Mews, Cullinan designed a few more houses using the knowledge he had gleaned from his self building adventures. Two were in London, the Kawecki house in Kentish Town (1964) and 1a Greenholm Road in Eltham (1966). Both houses were arranged so the main facade faces away from the street, with large, angled roof lines that allow the maximum natural light. They were also both constructed of reclaimed brick, timber frames and concrete. The later work of his practice grew in scale with housing projects in Camden and Hillingdon, offices for Oilvetti, church renovations and many more.

The Cullinan house was listed in May 2007, part of a number of small, architect designed mews houses in Camden Mews and nearby Murray Mews. A short walk from No.62 yields houses by Tom Kay, John Howard, Team 4, Peter Bell and many others. Cullinan was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2008, and stepped down from his practice in 2011. He died on November 11 2019 aged 88, still living at 62 Camden Mews.

‘Architecture is the celebration of necessity….You do what needs to be done, and you express it as you do it.’ Edward Cullinan

References

Edward Cullinan Architects RIBA Publications 1984

Architects London Houses- Miranda Newton

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1392599?section=official-list-entry

https://www.cullinanstudio.com/project-62-camden-mews

https://everchangingmews.com/projects/62-camden-mews/

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The Future Passed: The Trellick Tower at 50

27/6/2022

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Trellick Tower and the Edenham Way houses. Image from RIBAPix.

The Trellick Tower has loomed over Golborne Road in North Kensington for 50 years, now an iconic part of the neighbourhood, its profile gracing t-shirts, prints, cushions and much else. The tower is the most visible part of the Cheltenham estate, officially opened on 28th June 1972. It was designed by Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian emigre architect, and commissioned by the Greater London Council. Goldfinger was born in Budapest, and studied under Auguste Perret in Paris before moving to London in 1934. His career in Britain before World War II consisted mainly of small projects such as shop outfitting and a couple of private houses. He came to prominence with his design for three houses in Hampstead, 1-3 Willow Road, including one for himself and his wife, Ursula Blackwell (of the Crosse & Blackwell family). The house's design caused a major planning argument between the Goldfingers, Hampstead Council and interested parties, who were aghast at a modernist design arriving in the genteel neighbourhood. The Goldfingers eventually won on appeal and the terraced houses were completed in 1938.

Axonometric of Trellick Tower and the estate. Image from the Architectural Association.

The immediate postwar period was somewhat fallow for Goldfinger, with his hard edge designs out of step with the prevailing Scandinavian influenced Festival style. In this time he designed offices for the Daily Worker (now demolished) and a couple of primary schools. His fortune picked up in the 1960s with a commission for Alexander Fleming house at Elephant & Castle, occupied by the Ministry of Health. Goldfinger was then commissioned by the GLC to design two estates, one in Poplar known as the Balfron estate (1965), and the Cheltenham estate in North Kensington (1967).

Perspective of Trellick Tower South Elevation. Image from Architectural Association.

The estate was built on an 11 acre site previously occupied by demolished terraces, between the Grand Union canal and the railway line that cuts through the area. These two boundaries mean the estate is fairly compact, unlike the spread-out earlier LCC/GLC schemes like the Alton Estate in Roehampton. The centrepiece is Trellick tower, a 31 storey block in bush hammered concrete. The building's dramatic profile is created by the separation of services into a slender tower topped by a boiler house which projects like the bridge of a ship, with walkways connecting the service tower to the main block. Each flat in the tower has a balcony and large south facing windows. The deep recessed balconies, lined with cedar boarding, give the tower's facade a three dimensional effect with the play of shadows changing as the sun moves from east to west.

Trellick Tower entrance on Golborne Road with Club room above. Image taken by Erno Goldfinger, from Architectural Association.

As well as the tower, the estate was designed with five terraces of houses, two smaller blocks of flats and maisonettes, a community centre, a doctors surgery, a nursery, underground parking and an old people's home (the last two now demolished). A pub was included in the initial designs but was not built. The estate would also be home to Goldfingers office from when it was completed. The terraced houses sit along Edenham Way to the east of Trellick. They are three storeys high with an integrated garage on the ground floor, and coloured wooden panelling on the exterior. The two six-storey maisonette blocks sit just to the north of the houses, overlooking the canal. The estate was officially opened on 28th June 1972. But even at this moment of triumph, the days of the publicly commissioned concrete estate were numbered. The oil crisis and public and architectural reaction against such overwhelming use of concrete spelled the end of estates like Cheltenham. Smaller schemes made up of brick houses with gardens and irregular rooflines came to the fore and large estates were starved of funds for their upkeep.

Edenham Way housing. Image taken by Erno Goldfinger, from Architectural Association.

Like many postwar estates, the Cheltenham and Trellick came to signify the bleakness of modernity, despite their egalitarian intentions. After a number of incidents in the early 80s, security was improved on the estate and a residents group was formed to take over the management of the estate. The Right to Buy era also saw some of the flats pass into private ownership driving up property prices and increasing the gentrification of the area. The tower was listed in December 1998, with the remainder of the estate Grade II listed in November 2012. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea planned to add five new blocks to the estate, designed by Haworth Tompkins, in 2018, but eventually pulled the scheme after a public outcry.

Trellick tower and the estate have come almost full circle from a vision of the future through to a relic of the past and back to a reminder of the public sphere's lofty postwar ambitions. Hopefully it will be a landmark on the western approach to London for at least another 50 years to remind bypassers of this past and possible futures.

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Anatomy of a House No.2 - Sugden House, Watford

14/6/2022

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Sugden House, Watford, Hertfordshire
1955-56
Alison & Peter Smithson

Our first Anatomy of a House featured the stark modernist High and Over in Amersham, a perfect example of the Heroic period of modernist architecture between the wars. Our second Anatomy moves about 8 miles west to the outskirts of Watford, to visit a house designed by a pair of architects determined to revive that heroic era, Alison and Peter Smithson. The Smithsons had come to prominence in the mid-1950s with a design for their own house at Colville Place in Soho. As they themselves declared in Architectural Design, had it been built “it would have been the first exponent of the ‘new brutalism’ in England”. Their design showcased the building materials, with no internal finishes leaving the brick and concrete structure for all to see.

Design for a House in Soho by Alison & Peter Smithson.

Plans for other houses came and went in the 1950s, but their first built house was to be for Derek Sugden, an engineer with Ove Arup & Partners. Sugden was born in Hitchin, attended Harrow Weald Grammar then worked for a couple of engineering firms before moving to work with Ove Arup. He and his wife Jean commissioned the Smithsons to build a house at the end of Devereux Drive, to the north west of Watford town centre. Sugden's brief was for "a simple house, an ordinary house, but… this should not exclude it from being a radical house", and this is what the Smithsons would eventually give them. Sugden was an admirer of the Smithson school at Hunstanton, and Derek asked Peter for the name of an architect to design a house. To Derek's surprise Peter said that he and Alison would do it.

First design for the Sugden House by Alison Smithson

The first draft was drawn up by Alison. She produced a design with a split pitched roofline and irregular arranged windows. The Sugdens did not approve this design, with them wanting more natural light inside and a kitchen facing north. Peter reorganised the house, giving the outline a more traditional appearance and enlarging the windows, whilst keeping Alison's off key intentions. The architects said they intended the house to look like “a blackish solid block pierced with windows in the manner of Vanbrugh Castle, Blackheath”. Despite the obligatory dispute with the local planning committee, the house was approved on appeal. A covenant on the land specified that any house had to be built in brick with a tiled roof, leading to the ordinary but quietly radical design.

South East facade. Image from Architects Journal.

The house was constructed of reused London stock brick around a brick crosswall frame with concrete beams. The windows are large and metal framed, with an unusual arrangement, especially on the side facade. The roof is finished in concrete tiles and is much longer on one slope, covering the integrated garage. The front of the house faces south west, and sits at the top of a sloping lawn. Inside the house is arranged in a semi-open plan around a freestanding fireplace, with the flooring finished with chequerboard vinyl tiles. As intended with the unbuilt house in Soho, the interior is left with minimal finishes, showcasing the brick, concrete and timber construction materials. A timber, open staircase leads upstairs to four bedrooms and a bathroom.

Interior of Sugden House. Image from RIBApix.

The Sugdens were very pleased with the finished house and lived there for nearly 60 years. The garden was an ongoing project with Jean slowly landscaping the grounds, with shrubs, trees and wild grass eventually complementing the exterior of the house. The house was listed in July 2012 and is currently Grade II. Jean died in 2007, and Derek later married Katherine Douglas. Derek died in 2015, and for the first time the house was put on the market and sold.

The Smithsons would go on to a career of many words but few buildings. Their most famous works post-Sugden House are the Economist Buildings (1965) in St James Street, SW1A and the Robin Hood Garden Estate (1972) in Poplar, now in the process of being demolished. You can watch the Smithsons talking about the design and building of Robin Hood Gardens in the short film The Smithsons on Housing by B.S. Johnson. The duo produced a handful of other domestic designs in their subsequent career, most notably Upper Farm Cottage (aka Solar Pavilion) in 1962, a timber framed house cum studio in Wiltshire. The Sugden House stands as a testament to both the Smithsons unique vision of what a house could be and to the Sugdens wish to make a house of their own, a simple but radical home.

References
Alison and Peter Smithson (Works and Projects)- Marco Vidotto

Alison and Peter Smithson (Twentieth Century Architects)- Mark Crinson

Modernism without Rhetoric: Essays on the work of Alison and Peter Smithson- Edited by Helen Webster

https://c20society.org.uk/obituaries/derek-sugden

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/13/derek-sugden

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Anatomy of a House No.1- High and Over, Amersham

24/5/2022

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Anatomy of a House is our new regular series exploring the design, history and architects of some of our favourite modernist houses. As well as featuring the most famous and influential houses of the Greater London region, we will also be giving centre stage to lesser known houses by famous architects and obscure houses by obscure architects. We start with one of the most prominent modernist houses in Metro-Land, High and Over in Amersham by Amyas Connell.

High and Over, Amersham, Buckinghamshire
1929-31
Amyas Connell

One of the most famous modernist houses in Metro-Land, and indeed the country, High and Over was a forerunner for the new style houses built through the 1930s. Other houses have a claim to be the first modernist dwellings in Britain, such as Peter Behrens New Ways in Northampton (1925) or the Silver End Houses in Essex (1926), but High and Over was the house that brought modernist domestic design to the public's attention.

The house was commissioned by Professor Bernard Ashmole, who was at the time the director of the British School at Rome, later of the British Museum. Ashmole and his wife Dorothy moved back to Britain in 1928 and wanted a home in the countryside within commutable distance of London. Ashmole had met architect Amyas Connell at the school in Rome and asked him to design a house to be situated on 12 acres of land on a hilly site outside Amersham, a stop on the Metropolitan Railway.

Amyas Connell was born in Eltham, New Zealand in 1901, and after training with an architect in Wellington before travelling to Rome to attend the Rome School. Connell cut short his stay in Rome to design High and Over, with the planning application submitted in May 1929. The application was approved with the council saying they were doing so “with the greatest reluctance”. The council did not like the start modernist design but couldn't find a legal reason to turn it down (this was obviously before “in keeping” became a valid reason).

Connell had originally planned for the building to be entirely constructed of concrete. However the expertise of buildings firms in Britain at this time was somewhat limited when it came to using concrete for smaller domestic projects. Instead the house was constructed by Messers Watson of Ascot, using a concrete frame with brick and block infill, with a bright white rendered finish.

Despite its stark geometry and white walls, Connell’s design for High and Over took many cues from historical styles of architecture. The Y shaped plan of the house, with its three wings allowed the Asmoles an almost 360 degree view over the countryside, as well as providing maximum sunlight into the house. Similar plans designed to catch sunlight throughout the day had been used by Arts & Crafts architects like E.S. Prior and Hermann Muthesius. The three wings of the house connect to a hexagonal centre, a design that had also been previously used by Arts & Crafts designers.

Inside the house, the crisp white of the exterior was replaced with a more colourful, art deco-style palette. A fountain was the centrepiece of the house, with further decoration in coloured glass, steel and chrome strips. The concrete construction was hidden by suspended ceilings and a pale grey finish to the walls. You can see the original interior of the house in a short film by Pathe “The House of a Dream” . Of course the house was later featured in the televison film "Metro-land" by John Betjeman and Edward Mirzoeff, with Betjeman memorably declaring about High and Over "I am the home of a twentieth-century family, it proclaimed, ‘that loves air and sunlight and open country"

The house was part of a larger plan incorporating landscaped gardens with a swimming pool, a gardeners lodge, an electrical transformer and a water tower. The house was given centre stage in the gardens with a winding path leading up the sloping gardens, with various viewing points along the way to admire the countryside in one direction, or High and Over in the other. This integrated landscape and view has now been altered, with parts of the estate sold off over the years for the mid 60s housing estate which now surrounds the house. Also around the house are the four “Sun Houses” designed by Basil Ward, Connell’s partner from 1930 (they would be joined by Colin Lucas in 1934.

The house was listed in 1971, and is currently Grade II*. The house was subdivided into two homes, with the marvellous central hallway divided in two. Happily, the two halves have been reunited with the ground floor restored to its original floor plan and colour scheme. It may be over 90 years old but it still stands today as “The House of a Dream”.

References

Connell, Ward & Lucas: Modern Movement architects in England 1929-39: Dennis Sharp and Sally Rendel

A Guide to Modernism in Metro-Land: Joshua Abbott

Dennis Sharp Archive at Paul Mellon Centre

Images from RIBApix/Amersham Museum/Paul Mellon/Britain from Above

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Tube Station Typologies 1924-61

25/1/2022

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We are excited to announce our new book in collaboration with Philip Butler aka artdecomagpie, Tube Station Typologies 1924-61, an exploration of the golden age of tube station design, centring on Charles Holden’s work for the underground

We are launching crowdfunding to help publish this project with a list of exciting rewards including postcards, prints and a specially curated tour. Follow the link to help bring the book to life HERE

The book will feature colour photographs of 79 stations, with a historical and design overview of each. It will also include an introduction overseeing the development of design on the network during this period and a list of demolished stations.

The book will measure approximately 250mm x 200mm and be lithographically printed in the UK on 170gsm silk paper. It will feature 200 pages that will have sewn casebound binding in a hardback cover with white embossed foil text.

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Anatomy of a House No.7​St Raphael, Hornchurch, Havering1933Stewart Lloyd Thomson

Anatomy of a House No.6 Torilla, Nast Hyde, Hertfordshire 1935 F.R.S. Yorke

Form

Authorship

Taste

Legacy

Anatomy of a House No.5​ Grand Union Walk, Camden Town 1990 Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners

1-3 Willow Road, Hampstead​1938-9Erno Goldfinger

62 Camden Mews, NW11962-64Edward Cullinan

Sugden House, Watford, Hertfordshire1955-56Alison & Peter Smithson

High and Over, Amersham, Buckinghamshire1929-31Amyas Connell

Archives

Categories

Anatomy of a House No.7

St Raphael, Hornchurch, Havering
1933
Stewart Lloyd Thomson

Anatomy of a House No.6

Torilla, Nast Hyde, Hertfordshire 1935
F.R.S. Yorke

Anatomy of a House No.5

Grand Union Walk, Camden Town
1990
Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners

1-3 Willow Road, Hampstead
1938-9
Erno Goldfinger

62 Camden Mews, NW1
1962-64
Edward Cullinan

Sugden House, Watford, Hertfordshire
1955-56
Alison & Peter Smithson

High and Over, Amersham, Buckinghamshire
1929-31
Amyas Connell