A modernist terrace overlooking Hampstead Heath, visited by House & Garden in 1957 and 2013
On a bright morning in February, my partner and I sat at the kitchen table looking out over a snowy Hampstead Heath. Our mood was sombre - we had finally admitted something we'd known in our hearts for a while, that our time in this beloved home was drawing to an end and we were going to move on. Eight years earlier, when we first set eyes on the small terrace of six modernist houses, we had to contain our scepticism. From the street, they are not the most glamorous of buildings. The entry in Pevsner politely describes them as 'reticent' and A Guide to the Architecture of London singles them out as 'examples of the short-lived English Brutalism'. It is hard to imagine the impact these six uncompromising structures must have had when they were first built. The shock waves would have echoed those caused by the V-2 bomb that destroyed the original Victorian villas.
In 1945 Bill Howell, an aspiring architect, went up to Cambridge, where he met his wife-to-be Gillian, who also became an architect. In the early Fifties, fresh out of university and with a limited budget, they were looking for a home in which to raise a family when they came across a neglected bomb site with fabulous views over Hampstead Heath. Together with fellow architect Stanley Amis, they planned the terrace and gathered four friends who agreed to buy the other houses. Bill had developed an intense interest in Le Corbusier's Modulor system, a set of dimensions that, if used consistently, creates a sense of harmony because it corresponds to the human body. This interest is reflected in the house's design: the dimensions of the sitting room, for example, follow this convention, and the inset terrace that the room opens out on to bears distinct similarities to the style of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation apartment block in Marseille.
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So successful is Bill's design that, once you are inside, you immediately forget the utilitarian façade; the house is deep, set on four floors and far bigger than it appears from the road. A dramatic open-plan living space provides the centrepiece, with a four-metre-high wall of glass affording a spectacular framed vista across Hampstead Heath.
Glazed partitions replace walls, allowing light to pass from one end of the house to the other, and providing X-ray perspectives through walls, up staircases and into the rooms above. Indeed, an article about the terrace published in the February 1957 issue of House & Garden said: 'Inside are more glass walls, glass doors, sunny open-plan rooms and open-riser staircases, all flooded with light... And - most amazing of all because it doesn't look it - each house measures only 12 feet wide!
The first of the terrace's occupants took up residence in 1956 - and she's still living there today. Subsequent decades witnessed the friends bringing up their families and sharing everything from gardening to nannies. Some years later, the owners were able to purchase an old builder's yard between their gardens and the heath. This idyllic strip of land that slopes down to one of the Hampstead ponds is fondly referred to as the Orchard and has played host to some legendary parties. The Orchard brings the houses together into a community, everyone teaming up for gardening weekends, vegetable growing on the allotment, bonfire nights and celebrations. It was during one of these festivities, to mark the terrace's fiftieth anniversary, that the sense of community and shared history really came home to me. I was showing Bill and Gillian's son around his boyhood home when he walked into the spare room and announced that this was where he'd been born - only in those days it was the kitchen.
The kitchen is now two floors below, but it's this amazing versatility that is one of the house's most extraordinary features; with no load bearing internal walls, it can be organised in various configurations to suit its owner. Indeed, in our house, the kitchen has been moved four times in 50 years, and every house in the terrace is arranged in an entirely different way.
The houses were created by young, cutting-edge architects with the emphasis on quality of design and detailing. By 2005, when we bought our home, it was loved but decidedly tired. The hard corners of modernism had been softened over time, the wood and quarry tiles polished to a rich patina by decades of stockinged feet. In renovating the house, we aimed to bring it up to date while preserving its history and ethos. We retained the original ‘slab’ underfloor heating, well ahead of the times in the mid-Fifties and still working perfectly today. We threw out the Eighties replacement windows, fitting instead vast panels of glass that had to be hoisted over the house and manoeuvred into place by a crane driver operating via a video link. I remember hardly daring to look in case the tons of glass suspended precariously in mid-air fell and demolished the terrace.
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The anxious moments were worth it of course. Through these vast windows, the heath becomes an intrinsic part of the internal space and the world takes on a different perspective. Even time is measured differently, not by the ticking of a clock but by colour–greens or golds, by the quality of light, by the swans clearing the pond of geese in early spring, the first arrival of the cygnets hitching a ride on their parents' backs, plumage turning from grey to white, flying lessons in the autumn, wings flapping like thunder on the final flight away before the cycle begins again and time moves on.
Critics of modernism accuse the movement of being cold and mechanistic; but our eight years in a modernist house have proved quite the opposite and have been filled with memories, warmth and community. We can take comfort in the fact that we're passing on the house into safe hands; good friends are taking it over: an architect and his wife with a young family, who I'm sure will love it for the next generation. I'm in no doubt that Bill and Gillian Howell would approve.
Jefferson Smith1/14Bill and Gillian Howell's modernist terrace overlooking Hampstead Heath was first featured in House & Garden in 1957 (below).
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Jefferson Smith3/14The sitting room - shown in 1957 (below) and today - has large windows overlooking the heath; the corner sofa and ottoman are from B&B Italia.
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Jefferson Smith6/14The mezzanine over the sitting room is used as a study; the 'Leve Kilin' chair is by Sergio Rodrigues (1973), and the 'Ladderax' shelving was designed by Robert Heal for Staples in 1964.
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Jefferson Smith8/14Pictures hang above a reproduction Louis XV table.
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Jefferson Smith10/14The main bedroom is white and tranquil.
Jefferson Smith11/14The kitchen, originally on the ground floor (below) has been moved to the garden level, and is furnished with a Le Corbusier dining table and blue ‘Maui' chairs by Vico Magistretti
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14/14A party was held in 2006 to celebrate the terrace's fiftieth anniversary, to which everyone who had ever lived in the houses was invited.
