Britain’s National Trust began its mission to ‘promote the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and buildings of beauty or historic interest’ in 1895. The Trust acquired its first piece of land, a Welsh clifftop, in the same year. Shortly afterwards, it took on its first historic house: a simple 14th-century hall house in Sussex with a thatched roof and an exposed timber frame. Since then, it has grown into one of Britain’s largest landowners. It has bought – or been given – 2,500 km2 of England and Wales, along with 500 historic houses, palaces and castles. It has 5.3 million members, making it one of the largest conservation groups in the world, dedicated to the preservation of the historic or the beautiful.
It has been agile in challenging preconceptions of what constitutes a house considered to be worth acquisition by the National Trust, beyond the conventional idea of a Palladian mansion in a landscape setting. It took on its first modern house 30 years ago, which was designed in 1939 by Erno Goldfinger as his family home in Hampstead, London. It looks after 251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, the unassuming semi-detached house in which John Lennon grew up. And now the Trust is raising funds for an endowment to allow it to take on a much more recent house designed by Richard Rogers and his then-wife Su Rogers in 1967, not long before they won the competition to build the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in partnership with Renzo Piano.
The house was designed for Richard Rogers’ parents. They wanted a home that would reflect their needs as they entered their 60s. Rogers’ father, William, was a doctor, and wanted somewhere that he could still see a few patients; his mother Ermenegilda Geiringer, known as Dada, had embarked on a career as a potter and asked for a studio with space for her kiln. They specified that the house should be built on a single level, to spare their ageing joints the challenge of stairs.
They found a site – a gap in the continuous line of bulky but comfortable suburban villas on the edge of Wimbledon common. The house was planned in two pieces. The smaller of them is a pavilion facing the street that originally contained a parking space and Ermenegilda’s studio. It serves to shelter the main house from traffic noise, and forms one side of a courtyard garden. The main house has an almost square plan. Their earlier experiences designing a house for Su’s parents in Cornwall, a project they had undertaken when they were still in practice with Norman Foster, was an important influence on the way the Wimbledon project was built. The Cornwall house, known as Creek Vean, relied on traditional building techniques, blockwork and concrete slabs. In sharp contrast, they put into practice some of the ideas that they had seen in the case study houses in California, designed by Charles and Ray Eames and others. They were looking for the higher standard of finish that comes from forming large-scale components in the clean conditions of a factory, rather than the messy compromises that are the result of working on a muddy site in the rain.
The structure is made up of five steel portal frames, painted bright yellow and left exposed, forming a tube with fully glazed walls at each end. There are no internal columns at all. The structure is clad on each side with aluminium panels finished in white plastic prefabricated off site, lifted into position and linked together with a neoprene zip-up joint. The panels came with an insulated core and needed no extra finishes inside or out. The openings in the side walls are circular or have rounded corners, an aesthetic derived from the auto and boat industries. The two end walls are made of floor-to-ceiling double glazing, one of which could slide open to form the entrance.
But a house is more than an architectural expression. It is also a home, a witness to the lives that are lived in it. Once a house is no longer lived in and has become, in some sense, a museum, those traces can easily be lost. The Shröder house in Utrecht for example, designed by Gerrit Rietveld, is now part of the Centraal Museum and feels antiseptic and sterile. But a self-conscious stage set decorated to suggest that its owners have only momentarily stepped out is equally unsatisfactory.
The Rogers family are donating the house to the National Trust, which needs to raise the money to maintain the building into the foreseeable future before taking it on. Their plans are to allow public access at certain times of the year, and also to put it to use as a study centre with participation from architecture students at universities in the area.
There are intimate traces of William and Dada Rogers everywhere in the house. There is a circular cat flap inset into one of the floor-to-ceiling panels next to the side door. A tiny metal rectangle engraved with the name Dr William Rogers is a reminder of the medical practice he once ran here. There is a selection of Dada’s graceful pottery, which once ran the length of the kitchen counter, like the skyline of a Tuscan hill town, as she told her grandchildren. Amongst the Eames lounge chairs, there is furniture designed by Ernesto Rogers, William’s cousin, whose Milan-based practice, BBPR, defined contemporary architecture in the city in the 1950s and 60s. William and Dada moved to Britain from Florence with their five-year-old first born, Richard, shortly before World War II.
The house was meant to be a prototype, not a one off – a way to get homes built quickly, easily and affordably. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, with land values being what they are in Wimbledon. But the house has displayed the flexibility and adaptability that Richard and Su had planned for. In her lifetime, Dada could never be sure if she preferred meals taken looking at the lush, lawned garden at the back of the main house, or facing the opposite direction to take advantage of the very different attractions of the courtyard at the front. With a minimum of fixed internal walls and no columns, it was never a problem to switch from one configuration to another. The pavilion at the front has seen the garage and studio reconfigured as a self-contained flat.
It is a house that still feels as fresh and relevant as it did when it was completed, more than half a century ago – a memory perhaps of a more optimistic time, but certainly not a period piece.
This article is taken from Anima Issue 4, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here