With the commanding presence of an ocean liner in a quiet north London street, the Isokon building, a progressive manifesto in its day, will soon call itself home to a carefully engineered mix of key London workers and private residents. Rescued from a derelict state in 2000 by the Notting Hill Housing Group and sensitively restored to its 1930s glory, the £2.53m shared ownership scheme provides 25 units for teachers, nurses, police officers and the like, subsidised by 11 regular units, with the purpose of conserving a cherished architectural landmark.
Designed by Canadian architect Wells Coates and completed in 1934 for clients Jack and Molly Pritchard, Lawn Road Flats (as the building was then known) was among the first modernist structures in Britain. Pritchard, an entrepreneurial engineer and furniture manufacturer, met architects Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius while touring Europe in search of innovative applications for plywood, and returned to the UK to found his own company, Isokon (from isometric unit construction), championing the modern movement and promoting buildings and furniture in the new idiom.
The Pritchards initially hired Coates, a maverick personality with no previous commissions but modernist training, to design a house for their young family on the Lawn Road site. But they soon concluded that "on a site in London today, one ought to build flats". Molly Pritchard, a doctor fully engaged with progressive ideas on nutrition and education, developed the brief for the project: an experiment in modern urban living for "young professional men and women with few possessions". A central kitchen was to provide meals upon request through a manager and daily cleaning would be included.
Coates, who had spent his childhood in Japan and would later design sailboats, responded with a plan for 30 flats on four floors, a penthouse for the Pritchards, a garage and a large kitchen and service area. He planned the units, which range in size from approximately 270 sq ft to 460 sq ft, down to the most minute detail, with tiny kitchens, a maximum of built-in storage and the minimum dimensions required for furniture layouts.
The development got an enthusiastic reception, although the flats let slowly and management proved complex. Pritchard was able to offer accommodation to Gropius and other refugees from Nazi Germany, including architect Marcel Breuer and artist László Moholy-Nagy. Soon the overly generous kitchen was reconfigured by Breuer to create the Isobar, which became a focal point for progressive Hampstead artists and intellectuals, including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and later Agatha Christie, creating a heady atmosphere against a backdrop of increasing political turmoil. A dinner club operated out of the Pritchards' kitchen and the enormous communal roof terrace was popular for nude sunbathing. With the involvement of Gropius and Breuer, Pritchard developed a parallel agenda of furniture manufacturing, and Isokon Plus continues to reproduce a number of pieces today.
By the late 1960s, the Pritchards had tired of managing Lawn Road Flats and sold it to the New Statesman magazine, hoping they had found a buyer sensitive to the building's history; instead, the Isobar was converted to gain revenue from three additional flats and the building was soon sold on to the local authority. Under Camden council's ownership, it suffered a cycle of inadequate maintenance and insensitive repairs that led to dereliction.
However, after the newly dubbed Isokon was granted a Grade I listing in 1999, Camden sought competitive bids and selected the Notting Hill Housing Group to restore the building to its original vision of minimal flats. Avanti Architects, with an impressive track record in modernist restoration including Berthold Lubetkin's Penguin Pool at London Zoo, took on the job of weeding through the decades of accretion and neglect to consider how the Isokon could be updated for 21st century living. Avanti's John Allan says the project today is the result of "hundreds and hundreds of quite small decisions, but in the end the building is at once more authentic and more current".
From concrete repairs to central heating to roof terrace handrails, the list of items considered and reconsidered to give the building a new lease of life is formidable. Partition walls between kitchens and dressing rooms/bathrooms were adjusted to the millimetre to accommodate modern appliances and ventilation requirements, while sensitive new touches, such as small recesses of glass shelves in the kitchens, were added. Worktops, tiles, floor finishes, light fittings and ironmongery were carefully selected to complement the original design. And because old photographs of the rooms were in black and white and no original windows remained, layers of paint were peeled away from door frames to uncover original paint colours. The rose petal pink that once graced the building's exterior is back.
But the painstaking restoration reaches its apogee in the penthouse, which one enters through a nautical-feeling copper door. Here, Coates designed a plywood extravaganza, now restored by furniture maker Nick Goldfinger, grandson of Erno, who removed the wallpaper that had been covering the curved wall panelling and repaired the badly damaged checkerboard with reversed grain plywood. Wall-to-wall, built-in cupboards in the master bedroom also have ingenious plywood pullout devices.
The former garage has been refurbished as a gallery space that will be dedicated to British modernism administered by the Isokon Trust and form part of a walking trail on progressive 1930s Hampstead that operates from Goldfinger's 2 Willow Road nearby.
Of the 25 units set aside for key workers, 20 have been completed or are under offer, mainly to people living in Camden and Westminster. Residents who have recently moved in are generally enthusiastic, particularly about Coates' well-planned storage. Joe Phillips, an ambulance driver who grew up in the area and works locally, says he never dreamt he would be able to buy into in an area such as Hampstead at age 24, while Louise Wykes, a Camden teacher, says the Isokon has changed her perception of architecture and enabled her to see beauty in modern buildings. Asked whether she anticipates a community spirit among her neighbours that harks back to the Isobar, Wykes wryly notes the salon residents of yore probably had jobs that left them less "time-poor and knackered" than today's occupants.
As for the units for private sale, which start at £220,000, Peter Davis of Savills reckons buyers will be willing to pay a premium of about 10 per cent to buy into a freshly refurbished modern movement icon, despite the small size of the units, nine of which are still available.
But, aside from the penthouse at £550,000, it seems as if they might appeal more to aficionado investors than owner-occupiers. One also wonders whether this form of shared ownership results in a truly sustainable community. Although the Isokon restoration is outstanding, the complex funding mix that enables an enlightened social landlord to mandate that people from different social groups become neighbours may not be the most effective use of public funds. A more obvious approach would be to pay our teachers and nurses more.
But, whatever the mix of residents, the gleaming Isokon is poised to sail ahead in all its former glory.
