John Pardey revisits the acclaimed modernist house that Peter Aldington built for himself and his wife in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, in the 1960s, and reflects on the nature of permanence and the architect’s enduring love of the ordinary.
Words
John Pardey
Photos
Richard Bryant/Arcaid
For most people, the buildings of the 1960s – unlike music and fashion from that era – have a tarnished reputation: an age of failing public housing schemes, precast concrete high rise, streets in the air, ghetto estates, and flat roofs that leaked. Yet for one-off houses, it was a golden era, and perhaps the best of these were Team 4’s Creek Vean in Cornwall, Richard Rogers’ 22 Parkside in Wimbledon, Basil Spence’s home on the Beaulieu River, Stout & Litchfield’s New House at Shipton-under-Wychwood, and Peter Aldington’s Turn End in Haddenham.
The Aldingtons had purchased a half-acre site, formerly part of a large house on the High Street in Haddenham, at auction in 1963. It had once been an orchard and contained fragments of wychert walls, a form of construction using local chalky earth and straw that is particular to this part of Buckinghamshire. A planning application was submitted later that year for three houses on the site, but this fell fowl of the Highways department who had plans for road widening, so they eventually reapplied for one house in May 1964. It was a further 15 months before the other two houses were granted consent, after the Council realised that the existing 5.5-metre-wide roadway was bounded by ancient barns and wychert walls.
The redwood boarded entrance door is tucked in behind a carport. Only high up, slatted clerestorey windows signal habitation within.
Aldington’s design arranged three houses in an L-shaped layout in the south-west corner of the site, tucked around an intimate entrance court just off the street. Two houses (The Turn and Middle Turn) sit on the west side of the entrance court behind rough, white-painted rendered walls, capped in red clay tiles and a surviving wychert wall that provides enclosure to the south side of the entrance court. Only high up, slatted clerestorey windows signal habitation within.
Turn End was a hands-on project; Peter Aldington and his wife Margaret, along with a group of local craftsmen, built the house over three years, completing it in 1967. It was an essay in economy in both detail and cost. It is the largest of the three houses and its entrance is shy, tucked in behind a carport where a redwood boarded door opens into a bright hallway. The hallway looks into a sheltered courtyard, setting up the inside- outside dialogue that informs the house.
Long section; site plan showing The Turn, Middle Turn and Turn End in the south-west corner of the site, and Peter Aldington’s former studio in the north east corner; cross sections; floor plan.
No showy architecture here, rather a slow burn; a sense of mystery that can only be experienced step by step. The house is in many ways humble, but its power comes in a sequence of spaces that make you pause: walking on the terracotta tiled flooring past a landscaped courtyard with a twisted Robinia tree, a few rocks, a bench and a glimpse of a sunny garden beyond; past a kitchen that invites seating at the built-in bench; then onto the main living space that feels like a snug with a block-built base for seating wrapping two sides and a fireplace in one corner formed in white-painted concrete. The exposed timber roof structure, supported to the high side of the monopitch over a mullioned clerestorey window, provides dramatic light from above. To the other side, a lower space beneath a timber balcony provides an open sleeping space. The bed (used as a couch during the day) is petrified in blockwork in its space, looking back out into the central courtyard. One effect of the courtyard and clerestorey windows is that, as the sun crosses the sky each day, the house gains sunlight in every space without any overlooking from adjoining houses.
The kitchen and bedroom open onto a courtyard landscaped with a pool, bench, rocks and a twisted Robinia tree.
The route terminates in a large, glazed pivot door opening onto the next wonder: the garden. The culminative effect is beguiling – an unfolding story of the house and the lives lived within it.
All walls are white-painted aerated-concrete blocks, with joinery and exposed roof structure in redwood and Douglas fir. It brings the world of the English Arts and Crafts to mind, but also Aldington’s admiration for the work of mid-century Danish architects, particularly Jørn Utzon’s 1960s courtyard houses.
The house used electric underfloor heating that was common at that time and fan-assisted storage heaters to the bedrooms, so is now expensive to run, although it is pretty well insulated by the aerated blocks. Not highly sustainable in terms of energy by any means, but this house has become a very successful home, so how sustainable is success?
Aldington, who turned 91 in April, has a reputation for being somewhat reclusive and taciturn – and of course he famously turned his back on architecture aged 53, at the height of his reputation. We can lament the buildings he and his practice (Aldington, Craig and Collinge) did not build, but for Aldington when asked this question, he simply says that when you cannot face a short walk across the garden to go to work (his studio was across the garden in a converted warehouse) then it’s time to stop and do something else.
The snug-like living space has in-built seating and a corner fireplace. A mullioned clerestorey window provides light from above.
The truth is of course, much deeper and perhaps begins with the reason why he was such a good architect: he could not deal with compromise. He found himself miserable, distanced from his growing children with the demands of running a business, the frustration of an obstructive planning system, difficult builders, and he could not risk the central pillar of his life, his wife Margaret – sound familiar? His first love was landscape architecture so the lure of garden design and a simpler life won the day. He became a gardener.
Relinquishing architecture has made the modest number of buildings Aldington designed – only 12 houses, all of which are now Grade II listed – more precious, and none more so than Turn End.
After living in Turn End for 57 years, what has changed? Well, Aldington’s beard is now bushy prophet white, so he looks like a Romantic artist from the Pre-Raphaelite period, or William Morris. The garden has grown too and become one of the great gardens in the country with it being Grade II listed in 2017 (one wonders if you have to consult the Heritage Officer before pruning?). And in 1998, Aldington established the Turn End Charitable Trust to maintain the house, garden and former office in perpetuity as an example of the integration of building and garden design.
The bed looks onto the central courtyard and is used as a couch during the day.
Has much else changed? Asked this, Aldington chirps up with some glee that they replaced the fridge door to a new green one some time ago, but nothing else springs to mind.
This makes me wonder why we automatically think that buildings change – or at least should change – over time. In my experience, particularly with great houses, the very best don’t change. Sure, some get an upgrade in terms of the building fabric – insulation, heating systems, windows – and kitchens and bathrooms tend to date and need an upgrade. But if the house is well planned, why change? Is this part of that elusive timelessness?
Thinking of some of the really great houses I have visited – Corbusier’s early work, Wright, Mies, Rietveld, Niemeyer, Koenig – most have had extensive refurbishments. And no wonder, they have sat out in weather for up to a century. Many pushed building technology as part of their uniqueness in their day. So it’s not surprising that Wright’s Fallingwater had to have the concrete cantilevers rebuilt, and Mies’ Villa Tugendhat, with its glazed façade lowering down into the floor, was substantially rebuilt after the occupying German army had finished with it. But one or two have remained pretty much as built, such as Utzon’s own house in Denmark or his later home on Majorca.
The kitchen glimpsed from the living room.
Kahn thought that the essence of architecture was only really revealed in its ruined state, with the bare bones of construction laid bare. This may be true for masonry buildings, but I don’t think the Farnsworth House would fair too well in that evaluation, and it remains a great building. But the idea of permanence, of an inner essence, is appealing. And Turn End does have an essence in its interaction with nature – the symbiotic relationship between garden and house.
Turn End’s modesty, its matter-of-fact construction, the use of simple materials, the fusing of inside and outside spaces, the spatial planning of different volumes – this is architecture without showing off. There are no cantilevers, no minimal look-no-hands oversailing roof planes, no pandering for the publicity shot. It is timeless, rooted in place and culture. Aldington’s houses remain relevant in taking place, tradition, landscape and the basics of building to create real architecture.
Isometric section showing pivot door from living room to garden, and slatted clerestorey window above.
I can’t help thinking it’s more relevant than ever in an age of endless imagery, where almost anything goes. We are bombarded with images daily on-line (as a quick experiment, I counted how many on-screen architectural images hit my retina in a single day and came to the worrying number of just over 200, which is why I usually hit delete!). How do younger architects cope with so much architecture porn? You can see the evidence everywhere. Too many new buildings look like something in recent media recast. But fashion always dates.
A glazed pivot door connects the living space to the garden.
The Trust will secure the legacy of house and garden, but perhaps Turn End’s true legacy is the way it reflects the English traditions of the picturesque and vernacular design and construction while fusing with modernist ideas to make an architecture of its place.
While the average life of a commercial building in Britain remains around 50 years, houses live on for much, much longer – they are, after all, not just homes but assets. In time most will be rebuilt. If Turn End ever becomes a ruin, the garden will doubtless take it over and future generations will still see the beauty of the ordinary.
Aldington took the basics – the path of the sun, the materials to hand, simple jointing, a love of bringing the outdoors inside, a simple palette of materials, an understanding of spatial sequence, and a touch of mid-century Scandinavian modernism – and applied them to every house he made. They testify to his love of the ordinary. Every one of his houses will stand the test of time – not least because they pay no interest in what was fashionable at the time when they were built.
Source: Architecture Today