High and Over: The Restoration of England's First Modernist Country House

On a prominent hillside above the Misbourne valley in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, stands a white Y-shaped house that changed the course of English architecture. High and Over was designed in 1929 and built from 1929 to 1931; the official list entry dates it to 1930. It was the first commission of Amyas Douglas Connell, born in New Zealand in 1901, undertaken in a London office he set up with the Australian architect Stewart Lloyd Thomson, and the plans carry both men's names. Connell later formed Connell, Ward and Lucas with Basil Ward and Colin Lucas, the leading interwar British practice for Modern Movement houses. It began, as many significant houses do, with a meeting far from the site, between two young men who had no idea what they were starting.

The house entered the visual record of the country almost as soon as it was built, and it has never left it.

The client was Bernard Ashmole, the British archaeologist and art historian who specialised in ancient Greek sculpture. At the time of the commission he was Director of the British School at Rome, where he met Connell, who was studying there. Ashmole was Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of London from 1929 to 1948 and Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1939 to 1956; some secondary sources describe him as director of the British Museum, but the verified record is Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, not director. An archaeologist of antiquity commissioned the most modern house in England. The pairing is less strange than it sounds. Both men were classicists of a kind: one of stone temples, one of the new geometry. Ashmole spent his life studying the orders of ancient Greece; he asked a young colonial architect to invent a new order for a hillside in Buckinghamshire.

A Y plan for sun and view

The architecture is a reinforced concrete frame infilled with brick cavity walls externally and concrete block internally, rendered and painted white: modern construction wearing the plainest possible face. The plan is a Y, with three wings at 120 degrees around a hexagonal central hall, designed to catch the sun and the views across the Misbourne valley. Two storeys with a partial basement, flat roofs with concrete canopies, and roof terraces complete the composition. The Y plan is the house's masterstroke. It gives every principal room its own orientation, its own aspect, its own relationship to the valley, and it makes the hexagonal hall the social and spatial centre of the house, a room from which the whole building radiates.

It was part of a larger scheme with an entrance lodge, built from 1928 to 1931, a water tower, a generator house and a geometric Cubist-influenced garden, much of which was lost to 1960s development. The lodge, the tower and the generator house announce the ambition of the project: this was not a house with a garden but a small modern estate, self-sufficient in water and power, its geometry extending from the hall to the gate. The land had formerly been part of the Shardeloes estate of the Tyrwhitt-Drake family, and the house sits above the valley the way a temple sits above its precinct, which is presumably how Ashmole liked it.

The significance of the house was recognised early and officially, which is rare for buildings of any age and almost unheard of for a house barely two years old. The list entry calls it of outstanding importance as the first truly convincing essay in the international style in England, and it was one of only two British buildings included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, the show that gave the International Style its name. It is widely described as among the first Modernist houses in Britain. A British Pathe short, The House of a Dream, filmed it on completion in 1931; it later appeared in Sir John Betjeman's 1973 BBC documentary Metro-land and as a location in the television series Poirot. The house entered the visual record of the country almost as soon as it was built, and it has never left it.

Divided and reunited

The Ashmole family left in the 1950s, and the house began the long middle chapter that so many great interwar houses endured. It was owned by the Punch cartoonist D. L. Mays and then by the architect Frank Briggs, who divided it into two dwellings in 1962 and 1963, the fate of many large modern houses in an age that had stopped building them and started carving them up. The Y plan, designed as a single radiating composition, was cut in two. The hexagonal hall, designed as the centre of everything, became a boundary.

It was bought by Nigel Budden in 1984; the architect John Winter advised on restoration of the exterior in 1994; and between 2005 and 2010 the two halves were reunited into one residence, the plan made whole again. Country Life recorded in 2010 that Ian and Diana Halley, who had acquired the major part in the mid-1990s and the remainder in 2008, restored it to its 1930s layout, reinstating the glazed doors, the ceiling light boxes and the hexagonal hall with its circular gallery. The 2010 purchasers, a sculptor and an art historian and interior designer, continued the restoration. Each successive owner understood a little more of what the house was, and each left it closer to what Connell had drawn.

High and Over is listed Grade II*, under the name No 40, High and Over, with attached walls, steps and pergola. It was first listed on 28 January 1971 at Grade II and subsequently upgraded to Grade II*, with a minor amendment recorded on 22 November 2017. It remains a private residence, and it has been offered for sale in recent years through published sales particulars. It was divided in the 1960s and reunited in the 2000s: a house that survived its own century, from a young New Zealander's first commission to a MoMA exhibition to a cartoonist's divided dwelling to a restored monument. It is the clearest surviving statement of the moment English domestic architecture turned modern, and the restoration returned it to the condition in which that statement was first made.

The practice that followed

High and Over was the beginning of a practice, not just a house. Connell, Ward and Lucas, the firm Connell formed with Basil Ward and Colin Lucas, became the leading interwar British practice for Modern Movement houses, and the Y-plan house above the Misbourne valley was its founding statement. The confidence of the plan, the certainty of the white render, the hexagonal hall as social centre: all of it announced that modern architecture in England would not be a timid import but a native production. The house's inclusion in the 1932 MoMA exhibition, one of only two British buildings in the show that named the International Style, confirmed what the building already claimed.

The larger scheme around the house deserves its own attention. The entrance lodge, the water tower, the generator house and the geometric Cubist-influenced garden extended the architecture's logic across the whole property: a self-sufficient modern estate with its own water and power. Much of the garden was lost to 1960s development, the same decade that saw the house itself divided, and the loss is a reminder of how fragile the modernist landscape project was. The buildings that survived, the lodge and the service structures, still frame the approach, and the hillside still gives the house its command of the valley.

Listing and afterlife

The listing history of High and Over is a small history of changing taste. First listed on 28 January 1971 at Grade II, it was subsequently upgraded to Grade II*, the mark of a building of more than special interest, with a minor amendment recorded on 22 November 2017. Each revision of the list entry was a revision of the country's judgment, and the judgment has only moved in one direction. What was once a young colonial's provocation is now protected fabric, and the protection is absolute: the Y plan, the hexagonal hall, the white render and the attached walls, steps and pergola are all named in the listing.

The house's afterlife in film and television, from the British Pathe short of 1931 to Betjeman's Metro-land to Poirot, made it familiar to people who never knew an architect's name. That familiarity is part of its preservation. A house the public recognises is a house the public will defend, and High and Over, restored to its 1930s layout with its glazed doors, ceiling light boxes and circular gallery, is now defended by law, by scholarship and by affection. It remains a private residence above the Misbourne valley, the first truly convincing essay in the international style in England, still convincing.