David Watkin welcomes a book on British twentieth-century houses that is unlike any other on the subject

The Twentieth Century House in Britain from the Archives of Country Life

Alan Powers Aurum Press, 40 [pounds sterling]

ISBN 1 84513 012 x

This fascinating book by the leading authority on its subject is outstanding for the quality of both its writing and its illustrations. A brilliant survey of material, much of which will be new to most readers, it covers the period 1920-2000, shorter than that promised in the title but a consistent topic, despite the dazzling array of styles, of which the names, such as 'Stockbrokers' Tudor' and 'Curzon Street Baroque', are often those of Osbert Lancaster, as Powers acknowledges.

He also points out that it may be thought surprising that Country Life, normally seen as a traditionalist organ, published so many modernist houses. Powers wants to play down the gap between traditional and modernist architecture, seeing merit in everything. He thus praises alike weak classical houses, such as Templewood, Norfolk, by Paul Paget for his uncle, Samuel Hoare (Lord Templewood), and Arundel Park for the Duke of Norfolk by Claude Phillimore; Prentice Walk, Hampshire, by Sherban Cantacuzino for Max Bygraves, in what one might call 'the secondary modern gymnasium style'; and grim modernistic houses such as Creek Vean, Cornwall, by Foster and Rogers, which features externally and internally exposed concrete blocks, now stained, while its 'slate floors meant that chronic leaks in the roof could simply be mopped up'! The belief that exposed brickwork and metal office furniture are appropriate for domestic interiors is seen in a house such as 62, Camden Mews, London, by Edward Cullinan, claimed by Powers, doubtless accurately, as 'ahead of its time'.

Despite his own openness to modernism, Powers quotes the hostility to it of H.S. Goodhart-Rendel and of Evelyn Waugh, who complained of 'villas like sewage farms, mansions like half-submerged Channel steamers, offices like vast bee-hives and cucumber frames', and invented 'King's Thursday' in Decline and Fall (1927), designed by 'Otto Silenus', about whom Waugh envisages a newspaper headline, 'Will machines live in houses? Amazing forecast of Professor-Architect'. Powers points out, interestingly, that no house had been built in England as extreme as 'King's Thursday' by 1927.

The interiors at Eltham Palace, created by Seely and Paget for Stephen Courtauld, included a drawing room with carved relief panels in the window-reveals based, improbably, on themes from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1921), which also sound like something from a Waugh novel. Always there are unexpected details about clients: the Duchess of Norfolk discovered Phillimore as an architect when she visited a tuberculosis hospital in which he was a patient. For Ashcombe Tower, Devon, built in 1934 for Sir Ralph Rayner, M.P., Lady Rayner, a Courtauld, chose Brian O'Rorke as architect 'on the grounds that he had never designed such a house before and would therefore be open to her ideas'. At Ashcombe Tower, Arts and Crafts met Art Deco. Not dissimilar was Chapel Point, one of three dramatically sited houses built in the 1930s on a rocky coastal site at Megavissey, Cornwall, by John Campbell, which express his belief in "a roof for each room'. He died in a fall from a cliff near Chapel Point. Woodfalls, Hampshire (1928-30), an essay in Mediterranean vernacular by Braddell and Deane for the Hon. Henry Mond, its largest interior an imposing neo-Roman pool room, is for Powers, "the equivalent of those miniature houses to which European royalty might retire from worldly cares'.

He is full of interesting apercus about people and styles: John Summerson's monograph on John Nash of 1935 "signalled a revival of interest in the informal planning of the Regency', while 'Smart London hostesses picked tip the fashion for Modernism', as in Oliver Hill's Gayfere House, Westminster, for Lord Mount Temple, Ramsay McDonald's Minister of Transport, whose wife commissioned the decor of the entrance hall with its laminated shell-pink myrtle wood and its peach-coloured mirror on the ceiling. Perhaps more questionable is Powers's claim that 'The period from 1955 to 1970 was one of the most stimulating for domestic architecture in the history of Britain."

References would have been welcome to Marshall Sisson and to the recent country houses of Robert Adam, a beneficiary of "the Gummer exemption' (PPG 7), the planning guidance introduced by John Gummer as Minister for the Environment that allows large new country houses of exceptional design quality. More to be regretted is the absence of plans, while Powers is a little parsimonious with precise dates for the houses. The balance of the book is upset by the decision not to give full coverage to Lutyens because of Gavin Stamp's excellent book in this series on his country houses. However, it is interesting to see Ridgmead, Surrey, designed by Lutyens's difficult son, Robert, in the Spanish Mission style at the request of his patron, Captain Woolf Barnato.

This, finally, is an important and original work that will change our perception of the pattern of twentieth-century British architecture and its relation to social history. It is enormously to be welcomed, for nothing like it has been seen before.

David Watkin's most recent book is The Architect King: George III and the Culture of the Enlightenment (Royal Collection, 2004).

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