Isokon
The London-based Isokon firm was founded in 1929 by the English entrepreneur Jack Pritchard and the Canadian architect Wells Coates to design and construct modernist houses and flats, and furniture and fittings for them.
In 1925, Pritchard had become employed as a sales and marketing manager for the British company Venesta, a subsidiary of the large Estonian plywood manufacturer A. M. Luther, based in Tallinn.
Despite his involvement with Lawn Road Flats and the Isokon company, Jack Pritchard continued to work for Venesta until 1936.
The end came with the outbreak of World War II when its supply of plywood from Estonia was cut off due to the Soviet invasion of the Baltic countries when the A. M. Luther company in Tallinn was confiscated.
It was designed by Wells Coates after a brief by Molly Pritchard, based on the Minimum Flat concept presented at the CIAM (Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne) conference of 1929.
Services included shoe cleaning, laundry, bed making and food sent up by a dumb waiter at the spine of the building.
In 1937, a restaurant and bar designed by Marcel Breuer and F. R. S. Yorke named the Isobar, located on the ground floor with a decked outdoor area, was added to the building.
Residents included the novelist Agatha Christie and her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, the Soviet intelligence recruiter Arnold Deutsch who was the controller of the group of Cambridge educated Soviet spies who came to be known as the Cambridge Spy Ring, the German born economist and Communist Jürgen Kuczynski, the author Nicholas Monsarrat, ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, architect Jacques Groag and his textile designer wife Jacqueline Groag, architects Egon Riss and Arthur Korn and the author Adrian Stokes.
The British architects Sir James Stirling and Alec Bright, later director of the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, Colombia were resident during the 1960s.
Regulars at the Isobar included the sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, the painter Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, all who lived locally, as well as Sir Julian Huxley, secretary of the Zoological Society of London 1935–1942.
Pritchard remained in London during World War II while Molly Pritchard and their children Jonathan and Jeremy left for America where the children were put in a boarding school in Canada while Molly moved in with Walter and Ise Gropius in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Lawn Road Flats was popular as a residence during the war due to being made out of reinforced concrete, and despite near bombs, survived the Blitz.
It was repainted brown during the war as it was feared its white surface would serve as a navigation aid for German bombers.
Philip Harben returned to make the food, architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner made a speech and letters from Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Agatha Christie were read out.
During this period, it was chiefly used to house single men with drug, alcohol and mental health problems.
After a long campaign to save the building, it was sold to the housing association Notting Hill Housing Group in 2003, in a joint bid with Avanti Architects, headed up by architect John Allan, with the pledge that a museum would open in the building.
It now contains 36 flats, most that are owned on Equity sharing basis by key workers such as nurses and teachers.
It is operated by the not-for-profit charitable Isokon Gallery Trust and is open 11 am to 4 pm each Saturday and Sunday from early March until the end of October every year.
In 1935, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, became Controller of Design (effectively creative director) for The Isokon Furniture Company.
A month before he left for the USA, Gropius recommended Marcel Breuer, a former colleague at the Bauhaus who had moved into flat 16 in the building in the autumn of 1935, as his replacement as Controller of Design.
On 9 July 2018, an English Heritage blue plaque for the three Bauhauslers Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy was unveiled on the building.
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby had recently graduated from the Royal College of Art when they designed their first piece, the Loop Coffee Table, in 1996.
