By Francesca Peacock
Despite being known for its genteel Georgian facades and Regency splendour, Hampstead is home to a great deal of modernist and 20th-century architecture. From the sleek Bauhaus curves of the Isokon building (home to Agatha Christie and cold war Soviet spies alike), to 2 Willow Road designed by architect Ernö Goldfinger, the area was a hotbed of modernist thought and design.
Built in 1964, Schreiber House, on the south-west edge of Hampstead Heath, is something rather different. When the furniture maker Chaim Schreiber was looking for a home for his family, he decided not to buy one but to build something bold himself. He commissioned James Gowan — then a young architect — to create something bespoke: a five-bedroom house, split over three floors, with an exterior of glass and Staffordshire brick.
From the outside, the house — one of the few postwar residential buildings in London to have Grade II-listed status — is a vision of postmodern sleekness, verging even on the austere. But inside, where windows reveal the green of the heath or the extensive garden, the feel is utterly different.
Floors of San Stefano marble or rich hardwood are made more luxurious by the original furniture — teak for the owner’s rooms, ash in the former servant’s quarters — all designed by Gowan and made in the Schreiber factory and included in the sale of the house for £10.95mn. Filled with the current owner’s extensive art collection, the house sits somewhere between an elegant gallery and the setting for a 1960s Bond film.
It wasn’t quite so impressive when the current owners, Simon Kirsch and his family, first viewed it: after Schreiber died, his son-in-law had converted the house into an office space, before applying to have the building demolished. Luckily, he was refused permission and the current owners were able to sensitively restore the building, reinstating hot water, replacing fluorescent bulbs with LEDs, re-engineering the heating and ventilation systems and, most satisfyingly, tearing down the dusty net curtains which had covered the house’s spectacular windows almost since the day of completion.
The result is a house which appears, on the surface, to be almost unchanged from James Gowan’s pursuit of mid-century architectural ideals; the repeating simplicity of marble, hardwood, bronze and stainless steel.
With such an emphasis on design, it might be hard to imagine the Schreiber house as a perfect family home. But Kirsch tells me the opposite is true: unlike so many tall and slim London town houses where you’re “going up and down stairs… the whole time”, the Schreiber house spreads out laterally.
With each of its three floors having views over the Heath, it is suffused with a feeling of openness, of light and space. This is not a cosy house, as Kirsch tells me, but it gives its inhabitants something else; a home purpose-built for family life, with an emphasis on practical, timeless style.
The property is a strikingly well-preserved piece of London’s postwar architectural history, a family home with an important legacy. When I ask Kirsch who he hopes will live in the house after him, he tells me he hopes for “someone who recognises [it] for what it is… a very important piece of domestic architecture”.
Photography: Savills
