48 Maresfield Gardens

This house was built in 1939 by architect Hermann Herrey Zweigenthal. It is constructed of yellow stock brick with areas of white-painted render and some exposed structural steel elements. Windows and doors are timber-framed.

Setting and Plan

The building is set back from the road behind a paved court, with its front elevation facing west and rear elevation facing east. It is two storeys high with a partial lower ground floor. The roof is flat behind a shallow parapet.

The interior plan combines an old-fashioned desire for separation of family rooms from servants' rooms, still widely popular in England at the time, with highly modern ideas about open-planning and the flow of space. It comprises a central entrance and stair hall. To the right of this are service rooms stacked on three levels: garage and storage on the lower ground floor, kitchen at ground floor, and maids' quarters (two small bedrooms and a bathroom off a small enclosed hallway) on the first floor. The remainder of the plan, to the left of the stair hall and spanning the width of the building to the rear, comprises three large rooms interconnected by folding or sliding doors. Those to the rear can be opened to the garden by full-height folding glass doors and tall folding windows. A chimney stack near the back wall partially divides the two rear reception rooms. Family bedrooms and bathrooms are on the first floor above.

Exterior

The front elevation is a composition of advancing and receding solid and glazed geometric forms. Windows are a mixture of openings punched into the brickwork, horizontal bands, and near floor-to-ceiling glazed walls divided by slender vertical mullions.

The building takes advantage of the slope of the site from north to south to provide a garage beneath the south side of the house, accessed from a vehicular ramp off Maresfield Gardens. The original timber garage door has been replaced with a panelled glass-reinforced plastic alternative. The elevation above the garage is predominantly brickwork, interspersed with varied fenestration and with a jettied first floor. Here, two tall narrow windows, one to each of the small former maids' bedrooms, read as a single large window with a central mullion hiding the partition wall behind, and a balustrade runs across the width.

The rest of the elevation is more heavily glazed and a canted balcony spans the first floor, supported at one end by a slender painted tubular steel column and at the other by an extension of the building's flank wall. The balcony's balustrade is of white-painted sheet steel pierced with a grid of circular holes, and has a hardwood handrail. This same detail is used in front of the maids' bedroom windows. Much of the area beneath the balcony is in-filled with glazing to create a large asymmetric bay window; the remainder provides a porch over the central entrance.

The entrance door is fully glazed in obscured wired glass and there is a full-height side-light to one side. A horizontal polished bronze plate with a semi-circular end visually cuts across the margin light and door jamb, housing a letter box, doorbell and lock. To the right of the door is a small window with radiused sides, lighting the cloakroom inside.

The garden front is to the east. The first floor is set back behind a full-width balcony with the same pierced steel and hardwood balustrade. A band of glazing, incorporating doors to the balcony, lights the bedrooms to the rear. The ground floor elevation is one of the most unusual features of the house. It is almost entirely glazed from floor to ceiling, with the glazing also turning the corner onto the flank walls. At either end are full-height double-leaf folding doors, and between the doors is an eight-light window which rises from a low plinth to the underside of the first floor. The window concertinas inwards, four lights from either side, towards the middle, so that when the two doors and window are fully open, each of the rooms inside is almost wholly open to the garden.

Interior

The house has generous internal proportions, particularly on the ground floor where rooms have a tall floor-to-ceiling height. The detailing is simple, with relatively little original built-in furniture, but the materials of fittings and fixtures creates richness. Original finishes are without mouldings or ornament: flush-panel doors with simple brushed metal furniture, square-sectioned joinery and shallow S-sectioned skirting. The outer corners of walls and reveals are radiused. Natural light and a sense of transparency is introduced through extensive use of glass, including top-lighting from circular skylights in the first floor bathrooms and hallway.

Architecturally, the most distinctive aspects of the interior are the stair hall and three principal rooms arranged in an L-shape on the ground floor. One of these rooms is to the left of the hall, and the other two (one north, one south) are across the width of the house to the rear.

The hall is entered through the front door at a lower level and steps up to the main ground floor, creating a sense of arrival. The principal rooms are each entered off the hall through slim full-height flush-panel hardwood doors. When open these create actual breaks in the wall rather than holes cut out of them. The room to the left has a late 20th-century built-in dresser, possibly built around an earlier piece of fitted furniture. This room has a wide full-height sliding hardwood door which connects the space through to those at the rear.

The rooms to the rear have woodblock floors laid in a herringbone pattern. They are lit by the almost fully glazed back wall of the house. The folding windows of this rear elevation rise from a plinth-cum-window seat, now with planters built in which prevent the windows from opening. Later grilles have been added beneath to screen the original radiators. The two rooms are divided by an off-centre chimney stack and a wide, full-height hardwood folding door. The stack is close to the rear of the building and the narrow gap between it and the back window is glazed. The fireplace, which faced north, has been removed and the opening blocked, but the flush tiled hearth remains. When the folding doors are open the two rooms read almost as a single space. A serving hatch and double-sided wall-cupboard with sliding doors links through to the kitchen. These are original but were faced in black leather in the 1960s.

From the hall a dog-leg stair rises up towards the front of the house before turning towards the rear. The balustrade is formed of a continuous loop of flat painted steel bar, encircling narrow hardwood panels and carrying a hardwood handrail, supported on vertical polished steel uprights. The balustrade is interesting not just for its distinctive design, but for the fact that it echoes balustrades designed by Zweigenthal in 1930 for the Schuhhaus Jacoby 1872 in Berlin, in 1933 for a remodelled house interior in Vienna (published in England in the Architectural Review in 1936), and in 1950 for the Morgenthau House in Long Island, America.

The kitchen, first floor hall and some of the bedrooms retain simple painted built-in cupboards, which are original to the building. Grilles over the radiators in the former maids' bedrooms are pierced with circles, matching the detail of the exterior balustrades. This may have been a detail repeated on radiator grilles throughout the house. The grass paper on the walls and hardwood fitted furniture is later, as is most of the kitchen, except for the original built-in cupboards. Bathrooms have also been refitted and there is later fitted furniture in the bedrooms.

Subsidiary Features

The courtyard to the front of the house is laid in crazy paving and stock brick walls which terminate in square brick planters bound the ramp down to the garage. One of the planters has been partly rebuilt following damage, but an early photograph of the house indicates that the arrangement is original, except for an extra brick planter which is a later addition to the front of the courtyard.

To the rear of the house the folding doors open onto a raised, curved terrace, laid with crazy paving which is flush with the interior floors. The terrace is enclosed by a low, painted, tubular steel rail which carries wide timber bench seats (the seats are replacements of the originals).