When most people say they want a period house, they mean a Georgian or Victorian. There’s a new member of the period club, however: modernist houses. Just enough time has elapsed that these former harbingers of a brave new world now feel like classics. In the eyes of the public, disdain is turning to affection.
When they were originally built in the 1950s and 1960s, architects considered modernist houses a clean break from backward-looking Victorian/Edwardian housing: with their flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling windows, split level interiors, open-plan interiors and honest materials, they were dubbed futuristic machines for living.
The public was less enamoured by the often brutalist aesthetic and design flaws: those flat roofs were prone to cracking and leaking; those single-glazed, floor-to-ceiling windows that brought the outside in were vulnerable to condensation; all that glass was fine in California, but in Britain modernist houses were bloody freezing.
Sentiments have changed. The recent vogue for open-plan layouts, indoor-outdoor living and mid-century furniture, as well as the retro aesthetic made popular by TV shows like Mad Men and hipster vintage shops, have lent modernist houses a new credibility.
A Scottish couple, Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton, have just retrofitted one of Britain’s most celebrated modernist houses, making it warm, comfortable and downright chic. High Sunderland, a three-bedroom house near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, was built in 1958 by Peter Womersley, a Yorkshire architect who was inspired by California design.
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So revered was Womersley by fellow architects that Sir Basil Spence, when asked in 1960 to name the best modern house in Britain, replied: “Anything designed by Peter Womersley.”
Locals called High Sunderland “the James Bond house”. Its original owner, Bernat Klein, was a Serbian textile designer whose colourful mohair tweeds were embraced by the likes of Coco Chanel and Christian Dior. Klein held fashion shows in his sunken living room and banned Victorian furniture.
When Kinchin and Stirton, both retired design historians, bought it in 2018, they were bowled over by its features: funky rosewood and walnut panels, bespoke furniture and joinery, travertine flooring and sunken living room. However, they found the rooms cold and damp. And in 2019 their dream became a nightmare when the house caught fire while they were abroad (Kinchin is a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York).
With the insurance payout, the couple seized the opportunity to not only repair the house but bring it up to date for the 21st century, with the help of the Glasgow-based architects Loader Monteith. Matt Loader, co-founder of the firm, is pleased that there is a new appreciation for mid-century houses. “Modernism is all about that postwar optimism of improving society and promoting the relationship with the outdoors. I think we could do with a bit more optimism right now.”
The restoration cost £290,000. Here’s how they did it.
The flat roof
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“Flat roofs are hard to insulate and have greater risks for leaks and condensation,” Loader says. “The roof had already been replaced five times, once every 12 years. We decided to transform it from a cold roof to a warm roof.”
With a cold roof, the insulation is directly above the ceiling, and there’s an air gap between the insulation and the roof, leaving a risk of condensation build-up. To make it a warm roof, the architects moved the insulation to the underside of the roof. To do so, they had to make a very tiny pitch, although it still looks like a flat roof to visitors. (They raised it only 20cm at a gradient of 2.5 per cent, and it is gradually stepped back 50cm from the outside ridge, so that people below can’t see the pitch.) He then lined the underside of the roof with insulation, which was sandwiched between a waterproof membrane.
They replaced the bitumen roof surface with a more durable single-ply roof (a heavy-duty adhesive plastic). It’s also topped by gravel to deflect rainwater. They increased the roof fall, the number of drainage outlets (from two to four), and the size of the downpipes so the roof could handle increased rainfall as climate change takes hold.
Flooring
The timber flooring in the sunken living room had to be removed and repaired after the fire, so they took the opportunity to install insulation underneath, topped by an underfloor heating system. “That slab of insulation ensures that heat is thrown up into the house and not down into the ground,” Loader says.
Heating and electrics
On the roof they removed an old water tank next to the chimney and added an air source heat pump and buffer tank that drive the new underfloor heating system and provide hot water to the house. This set-up replaced the previous electric heating system, which included a pioneering — but expensive to operate — 1970s attempt at underfloor heating.
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They installed new wiring and replaced the fluorescent lights and halogens with LEDs and installed ten new sockets.
Woodwork
Some of the most striking features of the house are the rich timber walls, floors and ceilings. The couple repaired, revarnished and replaced the old damaged wood: idigbo, a light west African hardwood, for the living room ceiling and walls; rosewood for the living room floor; walnut for other internal walls; Douglas fir and makore, a glossy reddish hardwood from central Africa, for the exterior walls, eaves and soffits. The joinery was done by Laurence McIntosh.
Windows
The problem with modernist houses is they often use metal casement windows that don’t have a thermal break: if it’s -5C outside and 20C inside, you get condensation build-up on the inside of the frames. The insurance from the fire wouldn’t cover the cost of replacing the windows, so the house still has single glazing, but Loader says double glazing is on a list for possible future alterations.
Slimline double glazing is a good option, but the ultimate game-changer for a modernist house would be a vacuum glass unit called Fineo. “It’s narrower than double glazing but performs like triple glazing,” says Iain King, director at Loader Monteith. “But it costs three to four times more than standard double glazing. We would still use metal frames on a retrofit, but we’d use aluminium ones that now come with a thermal break so there’s no passage for cold to run through it.”
Despite the single glazing, with the new roof, added insulation and air source heat pump, Loader says energy bills have been reduced by 35 per cent. Loader says: “Modernist houses had some technical shortcomings but those are surmountable, which I hope we have demonstrated.”
