It is a sleek ocean liner, riding the waves of a Sydenham street. It ticks all the boxes for that classic image of a 1930s modernist house: flat roof, streamlined form, banks of windows and a crisp white coat of painted concrete. This is Six Pillars, a house designed in 1935 by Berthold Lubetkin — lauded architect of the Highpoint apartment blocks in Highgate and of the penguin pool at London Zoo — for the then headmaster of Dulwich College Preparatory School in south London. This well-restored Grade II*-listed five-bedroom house is now on the market at £1.5m.
“We weren’t Lubetkin addicts when we moved in, and didn’t really know who he was,” says owner Roger Trapp, who bought Six Pillars in 1997 when it was marketed for £540,000 and is now moving with his family to Kent. “We were living in the area and were aware of the house. It’s been a fantastic house to live in.”
Having done their homework on Lubetkin, Trapp and his wife, Deirdre, continued the restoration programme begun by the house’s previous owners. They worked with conservation architect John Winter and English Heritage on replacing the roof and adding new insulation.
“It helped to deal with a lot of the problems associated with modernist houses, in that they can be cold and difficult to heat,” says Trapp. “Now the heating costs are no more than an Edwardian house, and the roof should be good for another 50 years.”
Such 20th-century houses come up for sale very rarely, especially ones of architectural importance and in good condition. Lubetkin and most of his great modernist contemporaries in Britain were better known for their apartment blocks and public buildings than one-off houses, while the advent of war in 1939 curtailed their work in any case. But it has been a good year for disciples of the modern movement seeking a rare opportunity to buy an original classic.
A house in Willow Road, Hampstead, by Erno Goldfinger, architect of the landmark Trellick Tower in Notting Hill, has just gone under offer after being marketed at £1.95m; the house sits next door to Goldfinger’s own mirror-image home, now owned by the National Trust. And on Hayling Island, near Portsmouth, a Grade II-listed, four-bedroom modernist house at 44 Sinah Lane by Connell, Ward and Lucas, a practice that was one of the pioneers of the use of concrete in houses in Britain, is for sale. Dating from 1934, 44 Sinah Lane is on the market at £795,000, although the property now needs restoration.
“The 1930s is a very interesting era architecturally,” says Cordula Zeidler of the Twentieth Century Society, which helps to preserve and protect significant buildings of the period. “It was when the modern movement really got started in Britain and there was a lot of revolutionary design in stylistic terms as well as in lifestyle. There was a breaking with all kinds of earlier historic styles and an attempt to reinvent the wheel, going back to primary geometric shapes and using materials such as concrete in a more open and structural way.”
Such innovation can come at a cost. As well as being wary of the bureaucracy involved in renovating a listed building, some potential buyers remain nervous of experimental 1930s houses, largely because such buildings were pushing the boundaries of technology in terms of the domestic use of new industrial materials and structural forms. Some have been subject to the kinds of problems associated with other, more public, buildings of the era, including concrete cancer — cracks, crumbling and stains caused by deterioration of the concrete and rusting of the underlying metal structure.
Updating services and coping with the limitations of modest 1930s kitchens and utility spaces can also be an issue. Windows are a common problem, as single-glazed period windows often offer inadequate insulation and modern replacements are not always in keeping. But a range of sympathetic replacements have become available, along with period-style fittings and ironmongery, as interest and expertise in the period have grown during the past 20 years.
“There’s a lot more known now than when these buildings were designed,” says conservation architect John Allan, of Avanti Architects. “There is now a very well-developed tool box for mending reinforced concrete, flat roofs, and so on. So I wouldn’t say that 1930s houses are necessarily more expensive to update than a Victorian or Georgian house.”
Allan recently worked on the £1.4m restoration of Connell, Ward and Lucas’s Grade II*-listed 66 Frognal, built in 1938, in Hampstead, north London. The house was in poor condition when the current owners took it on. Additions to the house — an upwards extension from the 1960s and a pool dating from the 1970s — were rebuilt. The rest of the building was also restored, updated and returned to its original 1930s exterior paint colours — sand, mushroom and bitter chocolate, with raspberry columns and a yellow front door.
“The house was certainly in need of rescue,” says Allan. “It is a real icon of the last phase of house- building in the 1930s. The great interest for us is finding the right balance between conservation and upgrade to make sure that these houses have a viable future.”
Stephen Simmons and his wife, Suze White, were pleasantly surprised by how robust and well-built their 1930s home was. They bought Tregannick, near Penzance, Cornwall, seven years ago, and it is now on the market for offers above £750,000. The house, which is unlisted, was designed by Geoffrey Bazeley in 1936. Like Six Pillars and 66 Frognal, it is documented in Alan Powers’s new bible of the era, Modern: The Modern Movement in Britain (Merrell, £35).
“We started with some advantages, in that I worked with many modern structures in my career as a civil engineer so I could see that it had been built to a high standard,” says Simmons. “It looked dreadful and hadn’t been well maintained but the faults were mostly cosmetic. It is a brilliant ‘machine for living’: it is south-facing, but the balcony shades the living room in the summer while allowing the sun in below it in winter.”
The couple found most of the few fittings and washbasins missing from the house discarded in the garden. The house and its interiors are now so authentic that it is sometimes used for photographic shoots.
As Allan says, the market for 1930s houses is a specialist one: demand is limited, but so is supply. Yet their significance is beyond doubt, their pros and cons, beauty and faults now all well understood. “We’ve loved living at Six Pillars,” says Trapp. “We’ve found that it’s a myth that working on a house with English Heritage is difficult. Our circumstances have changed and we now need to be in Kent, so we’ve spent a year looking for a modernist house there, although there aren’t many of them around. We’ve gone for an early 20th-century house, more art deco. But our first desire would have been a house like Six Pillars.”
