John Craven Pritchard (8 June 1899 – 27 April 1992) was a British furniture entrepreneur, who was very influential between the First and Second World Wars.
They later retired to a house also named Isokon on Dunwich Road, Blythburgh, Suffolk, designed by Jennifer and her husband Colin Jones.
The London-based Isokon firm was founded in 1929 to design and construct modernist houses and flats, and subsequently furniture and fittings for them.
Pritchard had hired Charlotte Perriand through Le Corbusier to design a trade fair stand for the company at Olympia, London in 1929.
It was designed by the Canadian architect Wells Coates after a brief by Molly Pritchard, based on the Minimum Flat concept stated at the CIAM conference of 1929.
In March 1931, Wells Coates, Jack Pritchard and Serge Chermayeff had visited Germany to view new housing developments, including the Bauhaus in Dessau, which had a large influence.
The building process of Lawn Road Flats and the opening event was photographed by Edith Tudor Hart who was educated at the Bauhaus school in Dessau.
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 Maxwell Fry named the Isobar – located on the ground floor with a decked outdoor area - was added to the complex.
Residents included the novelist Agatha Christie and her husband, the archeologist Max Mallowan, the Soviet NKVD spy master Arnold Deutsch who recruited the Cambridge Five, the German born economist and Soviet spy Jürgen Kuczynski, the author Nicholas Monsarrat, ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, architect Jacques Groag and his wife, textile designer 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, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo and the painter Ben Nicholson as well as Sir Julian Huxley.
The building was popular as a residence during the war due to being made out of reinforced concrete, and despite near bombs, survived the Blitz.
Philip Harben returned to make the food, architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner made a speech and letters from Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer were read out.
It is operated by the not-for-profit charitable Isokon Gallery Trust and is open 11am to 4 pm each Saturday and Sunday from early March until the end of October every year.
A month before he left for the US, Gropius recommended Marcel Breuer, a former colleague at the Bauhaus who had moved into flat 16 in the building in early 1935, as his replacement as Controller of Design.
The fourth Bauhaus teacher at Lawn Road Flats was Naum Slutzky, a Russian born goldsmith who had worked at the school in Weimar.
Changes in the manufacture of plywood meant a redesign of some of the key pieces in the Isokon portfolio, for which Pritchard hired Ernest Race, former furniture designer for the Festival of Britain.
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby had recently graduated from the Royal College of Art when they designed their first piece, the Loop Table.