10 London Modernist Villas……and the Analogue Cameras you need to shoot them with
EVERYBODY LOVES LISTS
And Architects are no different……..
The Modernist Houses Issue — *guest-edited by the late, unlamented, gloriously bilious VLS*
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I was asked to compile "the ten best recent modernist houses in London," a phrase containing two lies and a category error, since most of them are neither modernist, nor houses so much as basements with pretensions, nor in any meaningful sense *best* — they are merely the ten that photographed well enough to fool the RIBA judging panel, a body so easily dazzled it would give a commendation to a to a wheelie bin photographed at golden hour. Still. I have walked past every one of these things holding a light meter and a grudge, and against my own better instincts a few of them moved me. The rest I would happily render down for tallow. Here, with the camera each deserves, are the survivors.
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1. House in a Garden — Gianni Botsford Architects, Notting Hill
Imagine spending eleven years and a telephone-number budget to bury yourself two storeys beneath your own back garden under a copper hat the shape of a collapsing circus tent, and you have arrived at House in a Garden — a building so committed to its single idea (light, falling through a hole, like the Pantheon if the Pantheon had been commissioned by a successful hedge fund) that you almost forgive the oculus its smugness. The glulam roof was hand-carved by elves in the Dolomites and craned in like a coffin lid, and beneath it sits a marble-lined swimming pool in which one may drown in good taste. It is genuinely, infuriatingly beautiful, the architectural equivalent of someone reciting Virgil while you're trying to find your keys. I loathe how much I admire it.
Obviously you’d be an idiot to shoot it on: anything less than a Hasselblad 500C/M** with the waist-level finder — because you compose by looking *down* into the camera while the house composes by looking *up* through its oculus, and the resulting metaphysical handshake is exactly the sort of pretension this house has earned.
2. Kew House — Piercy & Company, Kew
Two slabs of weathering steel rammed in behind the gable-end of a dead Victorian stable, left out in the rain to go the colour of a forgotten cocktail sausage, and perforated so that the sun can dribble through onto the children like dappled woodland light or, less charitably, like the inside of a colander. It is corten, which is the architect's word for "rust we charged you extra for," and here, for once, the trick works: the thing patinates honestly, ageing in public the way the rest of us do, only with planning permission. A proper family house pretending to be a barn pretending to be a sculpture. I approve, grudgingly, through gritted enamel.
Shoot it on a black-paint Nikon F - worn back to the brass at every corner — because corten and brassing are the same religion, the cult of the honest scar, and only a camera that has visibly suffered is permitted to photograph a house that rusts on purpose.
3. Vaulted House — vPPR Architects, Chiswick
Built on the buried corpse of a minicab garage in the centre of a Victorian block, invisible from every street, Vaulted House is what you get when six hipped roofs each grow a skylight and decide to behave like the ceiling of a minor Bavarian chapel. The light pours down through the coffers onto the open-plan kitchen-diner-yoga-sob-room, while the bedrooms lurk in the basement like things that have been sent there to think about what they've done. It is clever to the point of being annoying about it — a house that does its best work where nobody can see it, which is either profound or merely the architecture of someone who has read too much about caves.
Shoot it on an Olympus OM-2n — Maitani's tiny genius, the one camera that meters light bouncing *off the film plane* in real time. A house obsessed with measuring daylight deserves the only camera that measures it back, and the OM is small enough to slip past the neighbours who still don't know the place exists.
4. Six Columns — 31/44 Architects, Crystal Palace
An architect built this for his own family on a side garden in Crystal Palace, which means every joint was agonised over by a man who has to live with his mistakes and sleep beside the woman who watched him make them — and it shows, in the best way. Concrete frame, timber warmth, a sidelong nod to the Case Study Houses of California translated into the meteorological misery of SE19. It won House of the Year 2024 and for once I can't summon the bile, only the low industrial hum of envy. It is modest without being meek, the rarest trick in the entire smug catalogue of British residential architecture.
Shoot it on a Leica R6.2— the mechanical SLR for the person who insists on doing everything the slow, expensive, over-considered way and getting it *right*. A self-built house for an architect demands a camera built for someone who refuses to delegate the thinking.
5. Red House — 31/44 Architects, East Dulwich
A great blunt cliff of red brick wedged into Dulwich with a chimney-gable so graphically bold it looks less like a house than like the *idea* of a house drawn by a confident child and then, terrifyingly, built. It is all silhouette and swagger, a Monopoly piece with the smirk left on, and it has been photographed more times than the Turin Shroud and to roughly the same devotional end. I distrust anything this Instagrammable on principle, and yet the geometry is real, the brickwork honest, and the whole composition lands its punch. A bully of a building, and I mean that as the compliment it barely deserves.
Shoot it on a Nikon F3 with a wide-angle, dropped to pavement level for the heroic low-angle hero shot — because this house was *born* to be shot like a 1970s album cover, and the F3/HP is the press camera that has photographed more chins-up-into-the-light egomaniacs than any device in history.
6. Slip House — Carl Turner Architects, Brixton
Three orthogonal boxes shoved out of alignment like the drawers of a dead man's desk, the top one clad in milky translucent glass planks that glow after dark with the soft, nauseous luminescence of a migraine aura or a service-station fridge. A live-work-sublet prototype, built green to the gills, by an architect who actually moved in himself — which lends it a sincerity that survives the fact that it looks, frankly, like a stack of frosted Tupperware left out for the bin men. And yet. The glow is genuinely lovely at dusk, and the ambition — affordable, adaptable, *replicable* — is the only thing on this entire list that gives a damn about anyone who isn't a millionaire.
Shoot it on a battered Olympus Trip 35 from a thrift-shop bargain bucket — the democratic people's camera, zone-focus, indestructible, costs less than a flat white. The one prototype here built for the masses gets the one camera the masses could actually afford. Poetic justice, exposed automatically.
7. House of Trace — Tsuruta Architects, Lewisham
They demolished the knackered old rear extension and then, with the lugubrious devotion of someone keeping their dead spouse's dressing gown on the back of the door, built a new one that *traces* the silhouette of the departed — its pitched ghost embossed into the brick and timber like a photographic latent image that never quite fixed. It is a house haunting itself on purpose, a palimpsest you can put the kettle on in. Profound, or the architectural equivalent of getting a tattoo of your ex; on alternate Tuesdays I believe both. The detailing, I concede, is exquisite.
Shoot it on a Nikon FM2 and deliberately wind a double exposure — the demolished extension ghosted over the new one — so the film does to the negative exactly what the architect did to the building. If a house is going to be a double exposure in brick, your camera may as well play along.
8. Sunken House — Adjaye Associates, De Beauvoir Town
Adjaye's charred-black timber cube dropped into a sunken court in De Beauvoir like a monolith that has come to judge Hackney and found it wanting. The whole thing is the colour of a Victorian chimney sweep's regrets — shou-sugi-ban blackness on every surface, a void that absorbs light, gossip and estate-agent superlatives alike. Older than the rest of this list and all the better for it, because it has had nearly two decades to make the neighbours feel inadequate, a job it performs with the silent contempt of a butler who has seen your search history. Severe, humourless, magnificent.
Shoot it on an all-black Leica M — paint, not chrome — because a house that has gone full goth deserves a camera that disappears into the same shadow. Two pieces of beautiful, expensive, light-tight blackness, photographing each other into the abyss. Susan Sontag would have had *thoughts.*
9. Pocket House — Tikari Works, South London
A small, dense, perfectly resolved infill house — brick, timber and concrete left brazenly undressed, so that the structure stands about in its underwear and somehow gets away with it — with basement doors that slide back to swallow the garden whole. It is called Pocket House, which is either an admission of square-footage or a boast, and either way it is the sort of compact, low-fuss, grown-up building that wins no headlines because it commits the cardinal modern sin of simply *working*. I have nothing cruel to say, which is itself a kind of insult in my house.
Shoot it on a Rollei 35 — the legendary pocket camera, a full-frame jewel that hides in a fist. The smallest serious house deserves the smallest serious camera; pun fully intended, and I refuse to apologise for it.
10. Max Fordham House — bere:architects, Camden
A Passivhaus mews so airtight, so thermally fanatical, so wrapped in heat-recovery ventilation and automated shutters that it practically holds its breath, built in honour of the great building-services engineer whose name it bears. It heats itself on the body warmth of its own self-satisfaction and a couple of heat pumps, and it will outlast every other house on this list while emitting roughly the carbon of a sleeping gerbil. Living in it must feel like being a much-loved organ kept alive in a sealed jar — admirable, slightly clinical, and not somewhere you'd want to attempt a fry-up. The future, in other words, and the future has excellent insulation and no smell whatsoever.
Shoot it on a Nikon F5 — sealed, motorised, computer-metered, leaving absolutely nothing to chance or human frailty. The most airtight, automated, obsessively-engineered house on the list meets the most airtight, automated, obsessively-engineered camera ever bolted together. They deserve each other. Set it to matrix metering and let two control freaks fall in love.
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*Next issue: I review ten "sustainable" timber pavilions and the people who commission them, with a flask of something brown and a profound sense of grievance. Bring your own developer. — TH
