'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. 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 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. Moderne houses were satirised as 20th Century Functional by the great Osbert Lancaster in his 1930's book 'Pillar To Post'. 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.

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  Semi-detached Moderne house in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

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

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.

See Also

Is My House 'Art Deco'?

References

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

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