Kilowatt House

“Kilowatt House, now Woodside House, by Mollie Taylor …Built in 1935-8, on a former quarry site, for the electrical engineer Anthony Greenhill. It is Bath’s only Modern Movement house. Constructed of reinforced concrete with banded metal Crittal windows and corner glazing, it has two storeys with a projecting semicircular stair tower and transformer chamber to the garden front, and flat roofs capable of being flooded for summer cooling. Furthermore, the principle of aesthetic control within the local planning legislation meant that permission to build was granted on condition that the exterior was painted the colour of Bath stone rather than the Movement's emblematic white Note 1.

Greenhill had a particular interest in acoustics, and his home was an experimental laboratory. On the E. Side is a garage and w of the staircase hall ws the Power Room and, beyond, a single-storey wing that contained the main recording studio, 45 ft by 23 ft and 16 ft high (13.7 by 7 by 4.0 metres), lined with acoustic board. The sitting room doubled as Studio Number Two and the main bedroom upstairs, with a shallow dome with concealed lighting, Studio Number Three. On the roof is a tank room that doubled as an echo chamber for mixing with the sound output of the studio apparatus. He produced ‘colour music’ which lit up an indoor ‘cascade of glass’, whereby an automatic system caused each note of the musical scale to light up in a particular tint. Thus in a musical composition the appropriate tints are selected in rapid succession, the colours always corresponding to the pitch of the sound, and the light getting brighter as the sound got louder.’ His gadgets used 150 kW of power.”

Note 1 49. Bath City Council, Op. Cit., 12 June 1935.