The Pavilion

The Pavilion is a private house with attached garden wall to the west, designed in 1958 and built between 1959 and 1960 by the architect Oliver Hill for Mr and Mrs Goldetz. It is constructed of rendered brick with green pantiled roofs and a large central stack.

The building comprises a one-and-a-half-storey central range set between two-storey wings, arranged in a roughly symmetrical plan. Each wing contains a staircase and was originally designed without through passage to the second storey. The house is entered via the east wing through a staircase hall and study. The central living room occupies the heart of the design, with the dining room and former servants' stair located in the west wing. Kitchen and former servants' quarters are positioned to the rear, while the second floor contains principal bedrooms in both wings.

The house is set close to the rear of the site, with the principal facade facing forward. The symmetrical composition features a central stack with a three-bay living room set forward beneath a broad pediment. Three round-headed French windows with keystones are linked by a string course suggesting pilasters between and beside them. The pediment contains a blind ocular light. The end pavilions have roofs obscured by parapets, with square-headed French windows on the ground floor fitted with shutters and keystones, and segmental arched windows on the first floor, also with shutters, keystones, and delicate metal balconettes—the only feature reflecting 1950s rather than earlier stylistic preferences. All windows contain small rectangular panes.

The west elevation features small casement windows in plain architrave surrounds, with those to principal rooms treated as tripartite compositions. The eastern entrance elevation displays a heavy panelled door under a square toplight, with a segmental arched casement window complete with balconette, shutters and keystone. A French window to the left and a sash window to the right light the staircase, which has segmental arched sills at both bottom and top. The rear elevation is a simple service area with metal windows to the ground floor, with a curved wall to the west obscuring the kitchen wing.

Internally, the principal rooms remain well preserved. The entrance hall contains pedimented doorcases to panelled doors and a baluster staircase typical of Hill's London town houses of the interwar period. The living room is a tripartite composition divided by pairs of columns at either end, featuring a high coved ceiling and central bolection-moulded fireplace. Double doors under a pediment open to the hallway; doors at the dining room end have been removed. The dining room is decorated with shell alcoves in early eighteenth-century style. Moulded plaster panels remain in the former principal bedroom in the east wing, designed for Mrs Goldetz, while Mr Goldetz's room is simpler in treatment. A corridor has been cut through the central bathroom and former maid's room to allow the former guest room to be reached from the principal stair.

This is one of only three post-war houses designed by Oliver Hill (1887–1968), representing a return to the neo-Georgian style he had adopted for his listed London town houses of the 1930s. This choice reflected both his clients' preferences and his own preoccupation in these years with history, evident in his 1966 book with John Cornforth on English Country Houses: Caroline. Hill's subsequent work, Long Newnton Priory (1963–65), is similarly a free-standing pavilion, but the Kingston house more fully demonstrates the influences of his interest in early neo-Palladianism. The design comprises a three-bay front under a broad pediment housing the principal living room, flanked by small two-storey wings each containing a staircase and principal bedrooms. The greater height of the central room creates awkward upstairs planning, and the rear elevation lacks distinction, but the principal rooms retain distinctive Hill features with minimal alteration. This is a rare and important late work by one of the leading English architects of the mid-twentieth century, reflecting the 1950s interest in eighteenth-century garden pavilion design.