Kathryn Williams and Craig Allen are a match made in modernist heaven. Their main home is in the Barbican, that block of Marmite brutalism in the City of London; their country pad, Churchmeadow, is a perfect midcentury box in a Suffolk orchard, 10 miles from Aldeburgh. The couple, who have no truck with curtains or wallpaper, have spent a dozen years and £250,000 restoring the run-down 1960s bungalow by the modernist architect John Penn; it has gone from “grimy and gruesome” to a classically beautiful machine for living in.
What is it they say about taking work home with you? Williams is head of retail at the furniture firm Knoll Studio, and has worked at B&B Italia and Vitra. Allen, now freelance, was creative director at Molton Brown and David Linley, and product director at Gucci. They met in the late 1990s, when they were at the Conran Shop, and found they shared an obsession with what Williams, 46, calls “modern with a capital M”.
Indeed, when discussing decor, Allen, 55, says: “Everyone knows ornament is crime.” It’s a reference to a famous line from the Austrian architect Adolf Loos. He says it jokingly, but we both know he means it.
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The couple acquired Churchmeadow in 2002 through meticulous research, tenacity and “stalking”. “It started when the Twentieth Century Society magazine published an article about John Penn’s houses in Suffolk,” says Williams, who trained as an interior designer. “We decided we would go and find them all. We went to look at the outsides, then wrote to all the owners asking if they wanted to sell.”
That sounds... enthusiastic. “Some of them replied,” Williams laughs. But no homes were offered. “Then, one day, we saw this place advertised on the internet. No mention of the architect, but as we’d been stalking these houses for so long, we immediately knew it was by Penn. I said to Craig, ‘Right, we’re going to see it this evening.’ We drove up in the dark, saw it at night and thought, ‘This is it.’”
Churchmeadow, in Rendham, is one of nine “temple houses” in Suffolk. (Their name derives from their symmetry and simplicity.) Built in 1966, it isn’t huge, with 1,700 sq ft of living space, but it feels spacious, it has views of the orchard and the meadow, and it absorbs daylight like a sponge. “It was in a monstrous state, but we could see its bones,” Allen says.
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Penn’s mentor was the Californian architect Richard Neutra, whose Case Study Houses, on the West Coast, are the acme of midcentury-modern style. But Churchmeadow’s previous owner was an old lady who didn’t really get modernism: “She’d attempted to make it like a country cottage,” Allen recalls. “It was full of floral furniture and the windows had huge curtains.” He pauses to let the horror sink in. “Fortunately, although she hadn’t taken particularly good care of it, she hadn’t changed it, either. It had the original layout.”
So there was much work to do, and it had to be done “to a standard that drove the builders mad”. The couple replaced the flat roof, increasing the thermal insulation, and put in a woodburner. They added cavity-wall insulation and brought the plumbing and electrics up to scratch. They also fitted a custom-designed kitchen, removing two internal doors that obstructed the sightline from the front entrance into the garden. (In 2003, they invited Penn for tea, and their work got the seal of approval; he’d always hated those doors.)
Ten years after starting, in 2012, another round of refurbishment included wrapping the building in striking timber cladding. The original brickwork, pockmarked with creeper, was covered with no-maintenance Canadian cedar, which has silvered with age. “We knew that cladding was in John’s repertoire,” Allen says. “He used it in other houses.”
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One bathroom for three double bedrooms might have been fine in the 1960s, but it doesn’t cut it in the 21st century, so an extra one was needed. The couple also widened the window apertures and installed Velfac aluminium windows. “They way exceed the thermal requirements of building regs,” Allen says. “They’re factory-finished, so will never need to be painted again. Now people think it’s a new-build — the man from the electricity board said, ‘I don’t know why you have old meters in a new house.’”
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He sees this as a compliment: “It’s not meant to be a retro showpiece — far from it. We never tried to do a re-creation of anything. A lot of the furniture has been designed in the past 10 years. The fact that it uses some classics of modernism — well, they’ll go on for ever. The thing about modernism is that it’s always modern.”
The interior, dotted with designs by Marcel Breuer and Harry Bertoia, is in tune with the midcentury architecture, yet never lapses into Mad Men pastiche. It could be a textbook for fans of the modern aesthetic who don’t want a cheesy vintage feel. Do its owners have any tips?
The first rule is: avoid too much pattern. “Wallpaper is the great cliché of our time,” Allen says. “It’s been written about for the past 15 years as the latest trend.” Rule two: buy the best you can afford and steer clear of cheap copies. Third: remove superfluous detail. If in doubt, subtract. Around their one-legged Eero Saarinen dining table, for instance, they have three-legged Arne Jacobsen 3100 Ant chairs. “We didn’t want to have a forest of legs obstructing the view out to the garden,” Williams explains.
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Allen adds that there’s no need to buy vintage for a period building: “When people say, ‘They don’t make them like they used to’, that’s true — they make them a lot better. One of the issues early modernism had was that it was straining at the boundaries of technology.”
The couple never meant to sell, after such an investment of passion and cash, but they have a new love: the architecture of Ibiza. The island drew some of their design heroes — Le Corbusier, Erwin Broner and Josep Lluis Sert. “We went there and thought, ‘Wow, there’s modernism everywhere,’” Williams says. “These beautiful white cubes under a very particular bright Mediterranean light.”
They have their eye on a Balearic property, but must sell Churchmeadow first. It’s a big change for the couple, yet also more of the same, Williams says: “It’s all about modernism again.”
Churchmeadow is on sale for £750,000; 020 7704 3504, themodernhouse.net
Get the look
This year sees the centenary of the birth of the sculptor, jewellery and furniture designer Harry Bertoia. His grill-like Diamond seat, in welded steel, is manufactured by Knoll. From £594; skandium.com
Instead of wallpaper, a wool rug called Ode, made by Helen Yardley, hangs on the living-room wall. £2,250; helenyardley.com
The stainless-steel Arden candlesticks are by Robert Welch. £130 for three; robertwelch.com
Classic Knoll: Eero Saarinen’s oval Arabescato marble-topped dining table. £6,024; conranshop.co.uk
The Isokon Plus Long Chair is an icon of interwar modernism. Designed by Marcel Breuer, it has a birch frame. £2,330; skandium.com
Charlene Mullen’s Southbank cushion, in 100% linen, is embroidered with Britain’s best brutalist buildings. £198; scp.co.uk