Architecture Fan Buys House She's Dreamed of for 50 Years | Tour this MODERN Home in Camden, London

Hi, I'm Julia. I acquired this house in 2021 from The Modern House. I knew it and already loved it because I used to work at the AA in London and John Winter was the fourth year studio master in London at that time. He was building this house. It was two carriage houses which he'd bought and he got permission to build two storeys above and he built it by hand with his friends. So Peter Smithson poured the foundations and countless people, architects, were involved in the building of this house. Eventually he moved out and moved to his famous house in Highgate, the Corten House. I'm just so fond of the 1960s and earlier in terms of design. So I knew I wanted this house before I even went inside it. So where should we go first? So we're now walking into this tiny room which used to be John Winter's bedroom. I don't know how they fitted a double bed in it. I've known no one else but architects pretty much all my life. So we've got Michael Graves here who did a poster for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York where I used to work running the magazine Oppositions. And here's an architect, Carlos Jimenez, from Houston and that's Aldo Rossi there and that's the Office of Urban Architecture in Los Angeles and so on and so forth. That's the Maison d'Avere in Paris. There's a little photo of Corbusier, Frank Gehry's drawings of his chairs. I used to live in Santa Monica when I worked at the Getty Research Institute and was a publisher there. And Frank Gehry and Bertha Gehry lived around the corner and they became friends of mine and that's why I have this nice drawing of chairs by Frank. And I'm now walking into what was the garage and it's now a guest bedroom. It's just a lovely room with a horizontal window that looks out onto the green of the building next door. Malcolm Last designed it of Chassé Last Architects and he did an absolutely perfect job because it's like the rest of the house which to me is very important. Okay so I'm coming up into the main space of the house and it's an absolutely beautiful room. You'll see it has extraordinary huge windows, lovely light and the Portuguese laurel is a perfect thing outside the window for privacy and also just watching it. When I moved in the bookcase was extremely different because the shelves were all to the back and basically you could only fit CDs on them and so I had that altered but otherwise I haven't changed a thing here. After the house was finished in 1961 it was included in a book by House and Garden, Modern Houses and Conversions of also 1961 and it has photographs of the architect John Winter and his wife Val and the little girl Martha and photographs of how it used to be with the kitchen on the top floor. And the room is furnished basically mainly from my pieces that I picked up in Los Angeles. A lot of Eames and Bertoia and Breuer and earlier than 60s Corbusier. It all fitted very well that I should have this house as far as I'm concerned. It was like destiny. It was like built for me and what I like. This is my office. Terribly tidied you see the boxes I took out. So this is where I sit and work and sit and most of the time because I have this extraordinary view of trees, non-stop trees going on forever out the window here. The very nice things about this house that the blind comes down between the double glazing so you never have to clean it which is absolutely fantastic. Yes so this is Marcel Breuer the long chair which he designed for the Isercombe house which is around the corner in Belsize Park. It's unbelievably comfortable because it supports her in all the right places. If I don't get a sofa this is my sofa because I lie here whenever I feel I need to lie down. They wanted a kitchen moved from upstairs and they built the kitchen over the garage. You walk in and you go down a couple of stairs and it's a whole other space because it's a different level. It was very clever. It really makes it into a different place than the living room but yet you can see the living room all the time and it has this gorgeous huge window here which looks out onto nothing but green and eventually the trees in the distance of Regent's Park. The kitchen I think is absolutely lovely. The person who bought the house, Kenneth Brick, had very I think wonderful taste and he filled it with Eames table. This is his Eames table and Eames chairs and this is my Castiglione lamp which I bought in Los Angeles for a song. This is a collection of very personal things that I've collected over the years. My whole life really began when I went to the AA, the Architecture Association in Bedford Square and this is a drawing of one of the studios drawn in 1960 by Peter Watson who also drew those two drawings at the far end of the room where he and I lived and that is a drawing of Santa Monica Road where I lived. Edward Jones did that and this is a picture that encompasses, I think it was the fourth year AA in about 1963 or 1962. When people do come around it works very well because I can bring in two chairs and I can sit six people around this table and I can also talk to them when I'm behind the work surfaces here which is is really nice. I'm not isolated away from them. So the staircase here is obviously a huge feature of this house. It's quite narrow, it's quite steep. Many people have said put in a handrail but no because the centre metal post, steel post is extremely strong so why don't we go up it to the bedroom which used to be a kitchen. Here we are at the top of the house, lovely room, huge balcony, sunshine and this used to be the kitchen, the living room. It's an absolutely fabulous room to wake up in because I like a lot of light. I don't particularly like it dark so I don't have the curtains closed too much. You get early morning light on the balcony so it's very conducive to getting up and enjoying the day. I used to live on Regent's Park Road so I know this area, it feels like home and it was lovely to move back into it. I think in conclusion I'd like to say I feel very blessed coming back to a place that you've known and loved so long ago, had a whole life in between knowing it as a youngster and then coming back as an old lady and living here. The Modern House, selling thoughtfully designed homes across the UK.