There’s a missing link in house design: the link between traditional and modern. Not everybody, back in the 1920s and 1930s, suddenly switched styles as modernism kicked in. Some stayed trad, some went avant-garde and some did a bit of both. This is what makes Yaffle House, outside Poole in Dorset, so interesting. It was finished in 1931 and it’s a glorious hybrid. You can see the style shift before your very eyes.

This is a Grade II-listed house, on the market for £1.5m, that has design history oozing from its eaves. The architect was Sir Edward Maufe, best known for Guildford Cathedral. The client was Cyril Carter, head of the famous Poole Pottery.

Carter was obviously doing well out of ceramics, because he built this large, six-bedroom house on 18 acres of land looking down to Poole Harbour for about £20,000. At the time, a typical semi in the home counties cost £600.

Its quality was recognised early. Even before it was finished, Yaffle House won the Ideal Home Award in 1930.

Much of the land was parcelled up and sold off for other developments after Carter’s death in the 1960s, but the house still has an acre of mature garden. As you approach it over the brow of the highest hill in the area, it immediately stands out, plainly several cuts above its neighbours.

Its owners, Peter and Gwen Holguette, have lived at Yaffle House since 1988, when the property was valued at £250,000.

“That was expensive for round here,” says Peter, “but it was the sheer beauty of the place that attracted us. We had been looking at various newly built boxes in the neighbourhood, but this stood out. It was the light and space — the features of the period. So we went down to Poole Pottery to find out a bit more about it. But most of the history we learned later.”

Maufe cut his teeth as an architect in the Arts and Crafts style, and it shows. But he also travelled widely in Europe, saw art deco and the emerging new modernist style and incorporated elements of both into this almost playful house.

How much Maufe was influenced by Carter is unclear — the house certainly incorporates plenty of Poole Pottery products, particularly the pale, terracotta-like material known as faïence, used around windows, doors and parapets. Carter even had the roof pantiles specially glazed in Chinese blue, and his factory did him proud: they are still in excellent condition today. He used the same colour to paint the window frames and doors.

The house is perfectly habitable — the Holguettes have extensively upgraded its electrics and rescued original features from layers of paint — but, as Peter points out, it would be nice “to see this house go back to the way it used to be”. A full restoration might cost £250,000 or more.

Alterations by previous owners, before the house was listed, knocked the place about a bit. There’s plenty left, though: travertine marble floors downstairs, original doors and surrounds, stainless-steel curtain pelmets, modernist fireplaces and suchlike. But the house’s servants’ staircase vanished when an upstairs room was enlarged and a separate flat-roofed annexe was built at the back. Built-in furniture in Carter’s study was removed at about the same time. Some fireplaces disappeared and ceilings, unforgivably, were given that wedding cake-icing look. While the original steel-framed Crittall windows survive, there is secondary glazing, which a perfectionist would want to change.

But all this would be well worth doing. Peter sits me down in the octagonal dining room and lays out some 1930s magazine articles about the house. Even in the monochrome photographs of the time, it is obvious what an unusually rich interior this was, and could be again. Carter went in for intense colours and stone floors with big, art-deco rugs on them. Even today, you find remnants of his vision. Over the front door is a large ceramic woodpecker, a “yaffle” in the local dialect, hence the property’s name. A deliberately childlike mosaic, showing the Carters’ dogs, forms the hall floor.

Back in the 1930s, Country Life loved it. “Mr Maufe’s design is a lesson in the fusion of modern requirements with the English tradition of graceful design,” it said. The article pointed out then what is obvious now: that it had a traditional pitched roof and chimneys, but also flat-roofed sections acting as large balconies off the main bedrooms.

The layout is simple. Downstairs, the big living spaces face the garden — drawing room and sitting room (originally Carter’s library) on either side of the dining room, with kitchen, bathroom and garage on the north side behind. Upstairs, bedrooms are arranged either side of a corridor. The house is curved to face the sun and the sea, making this arrangement much more dynamic than a straight, rectilinear layout would be.

“We’ve been here for 18 years and it’s just too big for us now the family’s left,” says Peter, a retired telecoms researcher turned piano restorer. “It will break our hearts to leave it. We’ll find somewhere smaller, but still local.”

“We’ve seen ourselves more as caretakers, rather than trying to do anything big in the way of restoration,” adds Gwen, a retired teacher. That job will, the couple hope, be taken on by enthusiastic new owners who want to experience graceful living, 1930s-style. Poole pottery is now sought after by collectors. I reckon that this house will be, too.

Yaffle House is for sale for £1.5m with Winkworth, 01425 270 055, www.winkworth.co.uk

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