6, Bacon'S Lane With Attached Steps

Private house, 1957-59, designed by Leonard Manasseh for himself and his family.

The house is built in salvaged stock brick from a church in Southgate, with exposed concrete floors and steep asbestos slate roofs featuring dormers and a stove pipe. Timber windows have black pivoting opening lights (most replaced in the late 1990s with a comparable Danish system), and glazed timber doors are hung with slate shingles to the side. The interior features exposed pale sand-lime brick on the principal storeys and timber linings to the attics, with black glazed brick skirtings and plinths. Internal doors are flush teak veneered with ceramic handles under an overlight, set in slender chamfered softwood doorcases framed with a narrow black painted timber fillet. The first floor floors are made from 74 salvaged Victorian marble wash stands acquired in Portsmouth.

The building comprises two storeys and an attic, entered at half-landing level via external steps, with a lower entrance at semi-basement level, both accessed through a projecting flat-roofed wing to the north. The steep pitched roof with unequal pitches was an ingenious response to a site covenant restricting new building to two storeys, allowing Manasseh to accommodate his family of five children and create increased headroom in his attic studio beneath a large dormer. The interior plan is highly complex. From the main entrance, stairs rise to a double-height principal first-floor sitting room and main bedrooms, with the main bedroom subdivided from a bathroom by built-in cupboards. Stairs descend from the entrance to a kitchen-diner, which steps down to an attendant sitting room originally designed as a playroom, now opening onto the hallway and garden door. Further bedrooms lead from the hallway. A steep open-tread stair ascends to the attic, where a small studio gallery occupies the end, naturally lit on all sides (to the west by the large dormer window) and overlooking the sitting room below. Landings and hallways are intentionally small to achieve economical circulation space, with overlights above internal doors allowing borrowed light into these areas.

The exterior presents asymmetrical elevations with windows of varying heights, some full storey height but all hung from the sill level above. The deep sill above the ground floor sitting room features an incised bird motif. A small concrete balcony projects from the first floor sitting room on the west elevation. A flat-roofed pod attached to the north elevation contains entrances at half-landing and basement levels, reached by external steps which are included in the listing.

Internally, the kitchen-diner is separated by a built-in dresser designed by Manasseh and David Wickham based on the Lundia system, with tiled floors and original fitted kitchen cupboards. A step in black brick descends to the ground floor sitting room area. The first floor sitting room features a built-in brick seat adjacent to the stove and is floored in the Victorian marble wash stands, selected for their convective properties. A thick cedar of Lebanon curtain rail forms a cornice at the level of the top of built-in Lundia bookcases, with a timber rail above the shelves screening the studio balcony. Ceilings are lined in Slotec boarding for improved acoustics. The main bedroom walls are lined in horizontal butt-jointed six-inch cedar of Lebanon planks, with a narrow horizontal window above the bed. Built-in cupboards throughout the house feature sliding plywood doors on nylon runners, strengthened with a metal or wooden fillet acting as a handle. The ground floor bathroom floor is of reused brown marble washstands.

The contemporary red and black engineering brick paved garden occupies the footprint of the original house's kitchen garden (not listed). Within it stands the statue of Youth by Daphne Hardy-Henrion from the 1951 Festival of Britain, listed separately at Grade II.

Leonard Manasseh was born in 1916 and studied at the Architectural Association, winning the subsidiary News Chronicle schools competition in 1937. Following war service, he worked for Hertfordshire County Council, Stevenham Development Corporation, and on the Festival of Britain, where he designed the '51 Bar. He entered private practice from 1950 but spent most of the 1950s teaching at the Architectural Association as head of the preliminary school (first-year classes). His early 1960s work for the London County Council included Rutherford School, now Lower Marylebone School (1959-60), listed Grade II*, and Furzedown Teachers' Training College, Tooting (1961-5). His most extensive commission was for the Montagu Motor Museum at Beaulieu, on which he collaborated with planner Elizabeth Chesterton.

No. 6 Bacon's Lane is the southernmost and most architecturally significant of three houses Manasseh built on the site of a large Victorian house formerly facing South Grove. His own house stands on the site of the former kitchen garden, overlooking Highgate Cemetery.

The development of surfaces as found was a distinguishing mark of New Brutalism, the distinctive movement of the 1950s championed by the slightly younger generation of architects including the Smithsons, Stirling and Gowan, and Colin St John Wilson. This was Manasseh's first work in the genre, anticipating his Lower Marylebone School. The house somewhat resembles the Sugden house in Watford, built by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1954-55, which was the first in Britain to use exposed brick and concrete aesthetically, drawing on honestly expressed construction and hung windows from Le Corbusier's Maison Jaoul (1954-56). Manasseh's house is more complex in its planning, use of levels and material palette than the Sugden house, possessing a quirky charm and humane domestic quality characteristic of his work and rarely seen in contemporary housing of this genre.