Tabori’s life before Camden was as interesting as his later designs. He was born in Hungary in 1940, and was imprisoned after the 1956 Soviet invasion, due to the activities of his family. He was released after six months and fled to Britain to reunite with his relatives. Here, through family connections, he got a job with architect Cecil Eprile, (known for his synagogue designs) and studied architecture at Regent St Polytechnic. There, he was taught by some of the period's bright young things, including James Stirling and later Richard Rogers. Stirling got him a job with fellow Hungarian Erno Goldfinger, with whom he worked for during two different periods. Goldfinger was a great influence on Tabori, and took time to mentor his young assistant’s work.

Rogers was also an influence on Tabori, especially with his focus at the time on mass housing and prefabrication. Tabori would later help with drawings for Team 4’s Creek Vean house in Cornwall. Another star name, Denys Lasdun, was the external examiner for Tabori’s thesis, and was impressed enough to offer him a job. Tabori worked for Lasdun for 3 years, a period in which the partnership was designing the new University of East Anglia campus. Tabori took over detailing the precast concrete units needed for the project from Ted Cullinan, who had left to set up his own practice, working closely with the engineering consultants Arup.

Tabori also designed the Oakshott estate in Somers Town (1972-6). The design is related to the Highgate project with stepped terraces, this time in an L-shape around a green space. The original brief had the estate finished in concrete but due to the department's workload, the project was given over to outside architects to finish. First it fell to Roman Halter, but he resigned due to ill health, before James Gowan was given the job of completing the estate, Gowan added the red brick finish we see today. Tabori’s third project was a small scheme on the junction of Mill Lane and Solent Road in West Hampstead (1981). Moving with the contemporary rejection of concrete, Tabori produced a design in red brick, with external walkways decked out in bright blue railings. Tabori also worked with Arup Associates on feasibility studies exploring the possibility of building homes, offices and shops over railway lines in built up areas. After a serious car crash, Tabori resigned from Camden and went to work in private practice.

Despite its bucolic location, in a meadow surrounded by pine trees, the house was very much something from the machine age. It was constructed of corten steel, a relatively unused material then (John Winter’s corten house in Highgate was completed two months before Fieldhouse). The steel frame held large windows of clear or brown “Spectrafloat” glass allowing 360 degree over the surrounding landscape. Corten steel is designed to develop a rust-like texture. Wolton chose it for this reason, wanting it to blend into the terrain, “It's a wild building and does not want to be tamed in any sort of way”. 

The other architects were mentioning when talking of the design of interwar car showrooms was that of Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, famed for the factory designs along the arterial roads mentioned earlier. The company designed the Daimler Hire Garage in Bloomsbury in 1931, a four-storey building containing a garage, offices, coach station and car park, designed in a similar modernistic style to Cameron Kirby’s showrooms. Wallis, Gilbert & Partners also designed a showroom and service station for Henley’s (1937) on the Great West Road, near their art deco factories for Pyrene, Coty and Firestone. The forty metre high, curved clock tower later became famous for advertising Martini when it was converted into a warehouse for the company. The building caught fire in 1989, and an office building was built on the site, retaining the clock tower. Wallis Gilbert and Partners also built car showrooms at Great Portland Street in 1926 and for Packard Ltd on the Great West Road in 1929, as well as service stations for Brew Bros, Old Brompton Road (1933) and Godfrey Davies in Neasden (1939). 

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.

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. 

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. ​

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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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.

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’.

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.

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.

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. 

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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