'Moderne' Houses

High Cross House, Devon. One of the classic 'Moderne' houses.

The 'Moderne' Movememt arrived in the UK after the first world war bringing with it a revolution in house design. The government-sponsored drive to mass produce 'Homes For Heroes' led to a desire to industrialise the process of housebuilding and Britain looked to Europe for inspiration. The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris gave us the names 'Art Deco' and industrial 'Moderne'. For the UK homeowner, Moderne houses were the result.

Moderne

Osbert Lancaster's Parody of Moderne Houses - '20th Century Functional

'Moderne' houses arrived in the UK as a reflection of the International Moderne, or Style Moderne, movement in architecture that swept Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century. The stark lines, white stuccoed walls, Crittall Windows and flat roofs of the houses that were produced reflected a new international aesthetic being pioneered by the Bauhaus and architects like Le Corbusier.

Often wrongly referred to as Art Deco houses (See 'Is My House 'Art Deco'?), or lumped into the catch-all description of '1930s houses', these buildings appeared in the UK in the early 1920s and were still being built by the late 1940s. It must be said that the new style was not universally accepted in the UK and there were concerns that our weather made flat roofs and sun decks an impractical solution. Sometimes called 'Sun trap' houses, Moderne houses were satirised as '20th Century Functional' by the great Osbert Lancaster in his 1930's book 'Pillar To Post'.

However, as well as wonderful estates of modest family houses, the period produced renowned classics by architects such as Gropius, Lubetkin and Wells Coates. Beautifully restored these regularly appear in films and TV dramas depicting the period such as ITV's Poirot.

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  Semi-detached Moderne house in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

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  A striking detached Moderne house.

By the end of the 1930s consumers had begun to reject the brutal simplicity and begun to ask for decoration around doors and windows - hence the confusion with Art Deco. The final straw was the gradual inclusion of pitched roofs and the arrival of a more restrained form of modernism.

Restrained Moderne

'Restrained Moderne' is a house style that emerged quickly after the arrival of pure Moderne. It was a style assembled for people who were seduced by the clean lines of the Moderne movement but who were slightly put off by the brutal nature of the flat-roofed houses that it produced. Restrained Moderne was a uniquely British fudge with the brutal lower lines, and horizontal mullioned windows, ofset by a nice safe roof 'like your mother had'.

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  Semi-detached Restrained Moderne houses in Richmond, Surrey.

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  A detached Restrained Moderne house, showing clean lines, but tiled roof.

Hollywood Moderne And Beyond

There is some debate about whether a style called Hollywood Moderne exists for houses in the UK. There was clearly a phenomenon of larger Restrained Moderne houses built in the late 1930s that adopted the styling of Hollywood Boulevard - sweeping driveways, green or blue pantiles on the roof, and balconies with ArtDeco flourishes. In the US Hollywood Moderne evolved as a more forumlaic architectural style that chose trains and boats as its inspiration. Its highpoint was skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building in New York.

See Also

Is My House 'Art Deco'?

Modernist Houses Of The 1930s

References

Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster (Frances Lincoln Publishers, 2008)

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