South Hill Park
London NW3

SOLD

Architect: Howell & Amis

Register for similar homes

An extremely rare opportunity to acquire one of Hampstead’s finest Modernist houses. The three/four-bedroom property has astonishing views over the Heath, off-street parking, a private garden and shared use of a beautiful orchard fringing Hampstead Ponds.

The property is one of six built as a terrace in the mid 1950s by the architects Bill Howell and Stan Amis, who went on to form the practice Howell Killick Partridge & Amis. Accommodation is arranged over four storeys. Every level has full-width floor-to-ceiling glazing across the rear elevation, providing framed views of Hampstead Heath and exceptional levels of natural light. The proportions of the house are based upon Le Corbusier’s Modulor system.

The interior retains its original configuration, with a self-contained one-bedroom flat on the lower ground floor with separate access from the street. This could easily be incorporated into the main house if desired, and indeed some neighbouring properties have installed a kitchen-diner here. The ground floor contains a large entrance hall with coat cupboards, leading to a dramatic open-plan kitchen and dining room that is partly double height. A spiral staircase leads down to the garden. The first floor contains a sitting room on the mezzanine at the rear, and a bedroom or extra reception room at the front. There are two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor.

The house has a pretty garden at the rear and access to an orchard beyond- the optional use of this is shared with neighbouring houses. At the front is an off-street parking space.

South Hill Park is a short walk from the shops and cafés of South End Green, as well as the facilities of Hampstead Village.

Please note that all areas, measurements and distances given in these particulars are approximate and rounded. The text, photographs and floor plans are for general guidance only. The Modern House has not tested any services, appliances or specific fittings — prospective purchasers are advised to inspect the property themselves. All fixtures, fittings and furniture not specifically itemised within these particulars are deemed removable by the vendor.


History

History of South Hill Park
The history of South Hill Park begins in 1878, when the street was laid out on land belonging to South End Farm owned by the dean and chapter of Westminster. The new Victorian houses were built with their better rooms facing the road rather than looking out over the wild Heath. The road forms a loop at its upper end, and originally the central area was a public garden. Later as the development gained in popularity, this garden was built upon and the new development was called South Hill Park Gardens, leading to the anomaly of a residential street with a different name on each side of the road. During the Second World War a V2 bomb destroyed several of the old Victorian houses. The hole left by the V2 on the west side of the road lay empty and forgotten for many years.

In 1945 Bill Howell went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he met his wife-to-be Gillian, who also became an architect. In the early ‘50s they were looking for a home in which to raise their family when they came across the neglected site with fabulous views over Hampstead Heath. Together with Stanley and Isabel Amis they planned a terrace of six houses, and gathered four friends and clients who agreed to buy a house each. Bill and Stan set about designing the terrace, with each house having slight differences to suit the needs of its owner. The houses were built between 1954 and 1956. The subsequent years saw the friends bringing up their families in the terrace and sharing everything from gardening to nannies, with parties in the Orchard becoming legendary.

The Original Design and Build
The houses in the terrace have a simple cross-wall construction using shuttered concrete frames and infill panels. Each house is 12ft wide, but the absence of any skirting, coving, radiators or other visual clutter make the spaces seem far bigger. A waiver was obtained from normal London County Council rules to allow a ceiling height of 2.2 metres to fit with proportions based on Le Corbusier’s Modulor system. The houses share a common flat roof, which was deliberately designed to hold a small amount of water for insulation purposes.

The central open-tread staircase is supported by a shuttered concrete beam and ties together the two sides of each house. Two concealed ducts run the full height of the building and hide all the pipework and wiring. Glazed partitions surround the staircase, allowing light to flood from one end of the house to the other.

The architects’ original idea of a communal heating system was rejected by the banks financing the project, so each house was built with a solid fuel boiler providing hot water and heating through underfloor pipes to the ground and first floors under red quarry tiles.

Originally built with an integral garage, to satisfy the planners, this space rapidly got integrated back in to the house for living accommodation.

The architects were intimately involved with every detail of the houses. In some, wardrobes or cupboards were built in to the front elevation of the house (which is why in old photos some of the panels aren’t glazed) so as not to detract from the width. The houses were deliberately designed with no load-bearing internal walls for maximum flexibility of use, and to this day every house has a slightly different layout. One aspect of this flexibility was the ability to use the lower ground floor as a self-contained flat, as in this particular house; for this reason there is a spiral staircase down to the garden.

Howell Killick Patridge & Amis
Although technically Alton West (or the Roehampton Estate, as it was first named) pre-dated the formation of the firm in 1959, this was the project where Bill Howell, John Killick, Stan Amis and John Partridge first worked together.

It was also the project in which Bill Howell developed his intense interest in Le Corbusier’s Modulor and where he created his simplified system of preferred dimensions for a building based on the Fibonacci series, a set of dimensions which, if used consistently in a building, create a sense of harmony because they fit with the human body. The double-volume dining area with a sitting room on the mezzanine follow this convention, with distinct similarities to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles.

Whilst Alton West has had a mixed press over the years from commentators and residents, in 1980 Alistair Cooke described it as ‘the most elegant and harmonious housing estate to go up since the Second World War’.

Historians have identified three tenets of the Modern Movement: a systematic examination of human needs; the need for architectural issues to be constantly reassessed; and the use of modern technology. HKPA’s thinking is firmly embedded in the Modern Movement and the houses in South Hill Park clearly show these three aspects.

Over the following decades HKPA’s practice grew in stature and the firm went on to design the Young Vic, the University Centre in Cambridge, the Combination Room for Downing College Cambridge and a number of other Oxbridge and other university buildings. They were known for their enormous attention to practical detail. They were also keen proponents of the terrace as an urban form, which was a theme running through many of their housing designs, and they had a strong historical consciousness – for example in relation to their Oxbridge buildings they were remarkably good at fitting new buildings into traditional settings. It is perhaps not surprising that one of Bill and Gillian Howell’s first homes was a 17th-century house in Soho which they restored.

Tragically Bill Howell was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1974. The firm continued under the leadership of Stan Amis and John Partridge until it finally closed in 1995.

The Orchard
Some years after the first residents moved into the terrace, the land between the gardens and the Heath, which had been a builders’ yard, became available. The owners of the houses in the terrace set up the Orchard Trust to purchase this land and to hold it for them as communal gardens. This Trust owns not only the communal garden (referred to as the Orchard), but also a narrow strip of land between Hampstead Pond No 1 and the rear gardens of numbers 32-76 South Hill Park. These tiny parcels of land are rented out and produce a very modest income for the Orchard Trust, which is used to maintain the communal garden.

The Orchard formerly had a gardener to maintain it, and one can at any time revert to this arrangement. However, at present there are enough keen gardeners among the residents to maintain it once a month, and there are always willing volunteers for the annual bonfire-night barbecue!

With thanks to Michael Reece

Related stories


Related sales


Recently Viewed