The Homewood

I rent my office space from good friends McDowell+Benedetti and they kindly invited me on their office trip yesterday.  We visited the Homewood, Patrick Gwynne's Modernist house, designed when he was only 24.  Its a National Trust property, set in a fabulous garden and has been lovingly restored by Avanti Architects.  Excellent guided tour; highly recommended visit.  Afterwards, we walked through Claremont Gardens, to Claremont Fan Court school, where M+B have been patiently trying to unpick the problem of a contemporary school's requirements, in a Grade I listed building, in a Grade I listed landscape for more than a decade, then back to Baltic restaurant in Waterloo for dinner.  Thanks for a great day out, guys.

The Homewood was apparently a labour of love for Gwynne and superficially appears as a straightforward exercise in Modernism; nonetheless the building is emblematic of British Architecture's unconvincing adoption of Modernist principles.  It's immaculately detailed and resolved; but it's a bricolage of Modernist invention and traditional, sometimes vernacular elements.  The residential accommodation floats at first floor level, with the approach elevation designed as a facsimile of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie, supported on ubiquitous piloti.  Turn the corner, though and the concrete slab is supported on expressed, concrete downstand beams, painted brown (as timber?), resting on brickwork columns.  The brick modules are tightly controlled and nothing is left to chance, yet this contradiction of free-floating and loadbearing structural languages is typical of the lack of conviction.  Internally, these contradictions continue: its not just the curvilinear elements that the guide points out to us as a kind of softening of the harshness of Modernism; its at every scale, in the architraves and balustrades, light fittings and so on.  I know, you're thinking Alvar Aalto, but it doesn't hang together like Aalto; this is not a clever use of brickwork gymnastics and curved edges to show how Modernism can become materially crafted; Gwynne just hedged his bets.  There are some stunning moments: the main room upstairs is like a Bond villain's pad (in a good way), the windows are beautifully composed and inventively made; my favourite is the terrace, which somehow feels magically light.  The only real bum note is the enamel painting on the main elevation, by one of Gwynne's friends; clearly stretching their relationship.  

Gwyne was an undeniably gifted Architect and in his own house, he created a kind of masterpiece.  There's nothing wrong with the building; its very British and it just indicates to me a deeply unresolved point about British Architecture: we have never really been Modern.  

Gwynne is one of those Architects that you think you know, but you're not sure why.  He designed the restaurant on the Serpentine and the 'mushrooming' (as our NT guide described them) forms became a kind of leitmotif for his work, as seen at the Theatre Royal in York.  Gothic, anyone?