Series 2 Episode 1: Who Lives in a House Like This?

Doctors have been known to undertake drug trials on themselves before releasing them on the public. Many architects try out new ideas when building their own homes. In this podcast Kevin Drayton considers three such schemes, each with a very different character.

Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to the first of the 2026 series of Make Life Better by Design With me, Kevin Drayton. so I thought I'd start off this new year with a bit of a defense of some architects. Not very popular perhaps, but. There is this idea that architects are people who design these strange, horrible buildings that the general members of the public are forced to inhabit against their will, their better judgment, and that the architects themselves all live in very elegant Georgian townhouses. Well, of course that's rubbish. However, perhaps to set against that, I'd like to talk about the long tradition that there has been of architects using their own homes, ones that they've designed themselves. To experiment with architectural ideas, um, that they think might struggle, to gain credence with clients until they've demonstrated that things can work, that they can be a good idea, and it's a long, as I say, an honorable tradition. And I'm gonna take today three examples. That I hope will illustrate the point. Now as we go through these, I would ask you to bear in mind that architects just the same as anyone else when it comes to designing and building a home for themselves, have to deal with the same problems as anyone else, in other words: finding a plot, which is not easy and getting more difficult probably. They've gotta get through planning and building control all the rules and regulations. And then, uh, it comes down to actually constructing the thing. And if you are proposing to use slightly unusual materials, techniques, whatever, that opens up a whole new set of problems. Now, this may sound like a whinge, but it isn't. It's simple fact, compared with most other professions, architects don't make a huge amount of money. That's not to say that there aren't numerous architects around who do make a very good living, but the ones that get any sort of media coverage, the Starchitects as they're known, they tend to be the few and far between who really put together a big income in their lifetimes. So. Money. The cost of things is just as important to architects as it is to any other client group. So So I am gonna start with my first example, and that is a house that was created by the husband and wife team of Michael and Patty Hopkins. Now, the house was known, uh, perhaps not surprisingly as the Hopkins House, and it was a classic example of a lot of the, I suppose, modernist thinking at the time. And we were just starting to see schemes by the likes of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers come through. And indeed Michael Hopkins, was a contemporary, and, uh, sometime I think employee of both those practices. The Hopkins house was constructed in Hampstead in London, and for the first decade of the practice that Michael and Patty formed, it was their home and it was also their architectural studio. It embodied the couple's thinking about architecture at that time. In a masterpiece of restrained radicalism, it's a simple two story rectangular box. It was largely constructed of lightweight, prefabricated components. The apparent simplicity and elegance of the building was achieved through an absolutely obsessive attention to detail. Every element, every junction, every connection was thought through, refined, um, really taken to the nth degree to achieve the quality that they were looking for. It's open, it's transparent, and, and those were factors fundamental to the concept, and despite it being in marked contrast to the neighboring heavy overwrought, Victorian masonry villas of the area, the building respected and responded to the landscape and the setting with a certain charm. The practice, uh, went on from this beginning to design numerous buildings of absolutely international stature. And the, the name of Hopkins has rightly earned respect and admiration in many different areas of architecture. For me, I think the practice was able to produce the masterpieces it did in so many diverse and different contexts because their concerns were about the fundamentals of architecture. That's of understanding a brief, a concern with context, physical, historical, and social and design in the service of society. I suppose as well then a deep interest in materials and the actual methods of construction. Clearly this is a podcast. It is not a video, and so I can't just show you a picture of any of the buildings I'm talking about today. But there are lots of illustrations out there, and if you've got either a decent interest or a few spare minutes, please do have a look at them. And I hope that when you actually see the buildings themselves, uh, it will add another layer of understanding to some of the things I'm saying. Okay, that's number one. For example, number two, it could hardly be a bigger contrast. In the village of Haddenham in Buckinghamshire architect Peter Aldington, designed in the 1960s, a linked group of three houses. Single storey highly articulated, set in very carefully planned relationship to each other, crucially enclosing outdoor spaces and making gardens integral to the composition. The inspiration for Turn End, which is the name by which the small group of houses is known, is very much the village of Haddenham itself. Obviously as experienced and understood by Aldington as an individual. Above all, it's about the integration and interplay of dwellings with gardens. Now uh, a simple illustration of the influence of the village's character, the existing village, when Aldington came to it, is that in the village, divisions, boundaries, subdivisions are generally formed by walls rather than hedges or, or fences. The earliest surviving wall type in Haddenham is called Wychert, which is the local name for walls formed by mixing local clay with straw to reinforce it and build that up in layers onto a stone base. Now the stone base stopped water coming up to weaken the walls, and then when you had sufficient number of layers to the height you wanted, the walls were topped off with a weatherproof topping originally, largely, I understand it was thatch, but nowadays it tends to be tile. So that's the, that's the weatherproof hat for it. The stone has given it a weatherproof base, and then the walls generally were rendered to protect them from driving rain from the sides. Peter Aldington's view was that the character of the village had been built up over a long time as each generation of residents added to their own stories. Copying- just a straight copy was absolutely pointless. Acknowledging the context, whilst reflecting the needs of his own generation was the approach that he took. I, I talked about the houses being this mixture of architecture and gardening. So when the site was found, there were a number of important trees already on the site. And the need to respect and retain those was another design driver for the scheme. But I, I think of them in a way as forming a sort of armature on which the new gardens and landscaping would be developed and emerge. The materials and the technologies available to Peter Aldington that were never available to earlier village builders also influenced the designs. Each of the three houses encloses and is orientated towards its own garden courtyard, whilst forming part of this larger composition. The houses are comfortable refuges from much of the hustle and and stress of modern life as Aldington thought of them, whilst at the same time displaying pride in extending the way of life, as well as the physical form of an historic settlement. Turn End, if you want to investigate this further, is really just the name of one of the three houses. It's the one that Peter Aldington and his family first occupied when it was completed. The other two are known as The Turn and Middle Turn. Uh, you can visit the site. It's well worth it and I think the contrast with the Hopkins house that I talked about will immediately be evident. But I hope that there is clearly, uh, a linking thread across two such diverse developments. So I come now to the third example and it's difficult for me to know where to start with this one for a number of reasons. I would say it appears to most people, the weirdest of the three by a mile. And it happens to have been designed and built by the man whose office I first joined at the start of the 1980s. Apart from people within the profession and people local to where he lived and worked, I suspect that the name Arthur Quarmby is little known now, but at the time that Underhill, because that's the name of the house he designed and built for himself and his family, when it was first completed, it was something of a cause celebre. At that time, not many architects self-build projects were featured in the Sunday newspaper colour supplement magazines. Underhill certainly was. Arthur was a deeply serious designer with one of the most inquisitive minds imaginable. At the same time as running a perfectly ordinary architectural practice in rather unglamorous West Yorkshire, Arthur's work found its way to the Antarctic and onto Hollywood film sets. He enjoyed numerous patents for inventions and research projects as bizarre as reproducing the mythical flight of Daedalus of Daedalus and Icarus fame. I mean, indeed I could devote an entire series to the life and times of Mr. Arthur Quarmby. But in an effort to get with the programme of this particular podcast, I'm restricting myself to talking about Underhill. Underhill. Well, the name's a bit of a giveaway. It's sometimes described as an underground house. But it isn't, it's more accurately described as Earth- sheltered. Arthur himself had a wonderful way to describe what was involved in the process of making such a, a dwelling. He said take a gently sloping hillside, cut a slice into the landscape, peel that back, create the building in the, the resulting opening of this raised landscape and then pull that landscape back over your shoulder once you are in as protection. And every child who's ever made a cave under the bed clothes understands this and also understands the feelings that, that such a home engendered. I mean, from. Badger's, house in Wind in the Willows to Tolkien's Hobbit houses, the romance and the coziness of the concept is pretty well universal. Arthur Quarmby was a, a rare combination, a learned professional, and childlike romantic. And it was his technical ability that allowed him to create things that most other people just dreamed of. So of course, earth sheltering as a construction technique doesn't have to dictate the look and feel of the interior completely, but Underhill's, very unconventional Meadowland exterior Arthur would regularly have sheep grazing on the, the roof of the house) that was only the starting point for what Arthur put into the house. The front door was circular. Nowadays that's not necessarily so unusual, but it was one of the first that was built certainly in this country, and it's a technical challenge in itself, how to construct this. The central space of the house was not, uh, a living room stuffed with leather sofas. It's what I can best describe as a subterranean lagoon. It was actually a figure of eight swimming pool protected by walls of corbelled local stone. That's just two examples. Um, the whole house was a feast to discover and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to do so. So there we are. We've got three contrasting designers, three houses each built for their own families. Three examples that experimented with, with cutting edge approaches, three experiments of what might be achieved. I've not bothered with detailed aspects about planning, building regulations, and the construction processes of the buildings. Because really in their own way, they'd be pretty much the same for all three. It's the magic of design and the diversity of that magic is the thing I really wanted to concentrate on in this particular podcast. Yes, there's been a bit of a break in in the episodes for which I apologize. A combination of Christmas and New Year and technical hitches that I'm still trying to grapple to the ground, uh, have, uh, have led to this delay. But the series will continue. I have several guest speakers lined up, guest interviewees, and if I can just sort out these little technical issues, they too will be with you very shortly. Thanks very much indeed for listening, and I look forward to being with you again very soon. Bye now.