House and attached garage

House and attached garage, Camden Mews (east side), 62

A private house designed by Edward Cullinan as his family home and built between 1962 and 1965 by Cullinan, his wife Ros, and their friends working at weekends. The building occupies a Grade II* listing position as a seminal work in the development of the small private house and a major influence on subsequent architectural practice.

The house is two storeys high, constructed principally from in-situ board-marked concrete posts and beams supported on the rear party wall. The first-floor structure overhangs and is cantilevered from this party wall with timber framing. The rear wall at ground floor and the garage are built from second-hand stock brick, with blue engineering bricks used for paviours to the steps and the surrounding courtyard. The building is positioned at right-angles to the mews along a party wall on the northern boundary, a configuration that maximises light to the interior. The open-plan living, dining and kitchen areas occupy a largely glazed first-floor gallery, whilst three bedrooms and a bathroom are enclosed at ground level.

The exterior displays characteristic features of the design's intentional material expression. The top courses of the brick ground-floor wall are staggered inwards. Above this rises exposed concrete framing with narrow horizontal clerestory windows lighting the ground-floor rooms. The ground floor has a central entrance on the south elevation, fitted with a glazed timber door with square margin lights. The upper floor is constructed in exposed timber and is cantilevered on the south elevation, with exposed oversailing joist-ends creating a projecting form. Narrow horizontal windows, aligned with those below, light the upper-floor level. Large horizontal timber windows occupy the upper west, south and east elevations; those flanking the central entrance on the south side are square in form. The west elevation windows have external timber Venetian blinds. Access to the upper floor is gained via external stairs across the garage roof, which is decked over to form a terrace; a bridge link between house and garage serves as a porch. The roof is very shallow with a slightly stepped monopitch profile and oversailing rafters on the south elevation.

The post-and-beam construction creates a distinctive impression of roughness and materiality, contrasted with the high quality of the large-scale joinery of the windows, which are set forward on generous sills. The separation of different materials in different planes through the use of cantilevered beams is a defining feature of the complex south elevation.

The interior expresses the construction materials throughout. Concrete posts are exposed, as are boarded ceilings carried on exposed joists. Paint is reserved for the brick walls of the ground-floor rooms. Built-in cupboards and bookcases line the cantilevered area of the upper-floor living space. A built-in kitchen occupies the centre position beside a narrow central stairwell, which is constructed in plain concrete. Doors are flush-panel timber, and the ground floor has a tiled finish.

Cullinan is recognised as perhaps the best-known architect working in the heavyweight vernacular tradition, also known as 'romantic pragmatism'. His own house provided an accessible and widely-imitated model that inspired a series of small mews houses, particularly in the Camden Square area where undeveloped backland sites were beginning to be developed by architects in the 1960s. The house also defined a typology for Cullinan's subsequent architectural work.

Cullinan studied at Cambridge and joined the Architectural Association in 1954, where he encountered architects including Ahrends, Burton and Koralek who were admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1956 he won a Fellowship and spent a year at Berkeley, California, where he met Wright and studied his work at first hand. He was also introduced to the work of Greene and Greene and the Craftsman tradition of honest timber construction, and particularly to Rudolf Schindler, whose love of materials and hands-on, piecemeal, expressive approach to assembly informed Cullinan's own methodology. Before his American sojourn, Cullinan had reconstructed the derelict Bell Tout lighthouse on the South Downs for his father while at the AA, employing detailing derived from Le Corbusier. Following his return from Berkeley, he worked part-time for Denys Lasdun while producing a series of small houses for friends and family that he largely built himself.

The house at 62 Camden Mews represents an early exponent of Romantic Pragmatism, combining natural and modern materials with vernacular and early modern references in a strongly focused, site-specific design. The façade demonstrates materials mastering and oversailing one another, deliberately avoiding the partial sophistication of 'flushness and hidden detailing'. Every element of the simple design occupies a slightly different plane. Cullinan has written that the 'indoors' and 'outdoors' are made of the same materials occupying the whole space created by the north and south party walls and the ground, and that 'it collects sun'. The forecourt is paved with blue bricks rejected from Denys Lasdun's Royal College of Physicians, for which Cullinan was working part-time whilst building this house at weekends. The house survives virtually intact and occupies a position of major architectural interest in the national context, defining a significant typology for small-scale residential design.