Wells Wintemute Coates OBE RDI (December 17, 1895 – June 17, 1958) was an architect, designer and writer.

He was, for most of his life, an expatriate Canadian who is best known for his work in England, the most notable of which is the Modernist block of flats known as the Isokon building in Hampstead, London.

[1] The young man's desire to be an architect was inspired by his mother, who had herself studied architecture under Louis Sullivan and planned one of the first missionary schools in Japan.

Between 1932 and 1936 Coates was in partnership with an English architect David Pleydell-Bouverie and designed together the Sunspan House for the 1934 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition held at Olympia, London.

[4] Wells embraced Le Corbusier's architectural mantra that buildings should be 'machines for living' (machine à habiter).

The building was compared to the exterior of an ocean liner by the novelist Agatha Christie, who lived there for a time, so clean and striking was the design.

[5] The apartment building was the brainchild of Jack and Molly Pritchard, who in 1931 established a design firm featuring Modernist architecture and furniture.

[6] It became a haven for Germans and Hungarians escaping Nazi persecution and hosted many famous personages including Agatha Christie, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer.

[13] He also had several private home commissions.During World War II, he again served with the RAF, this time working on fighter aircraft development, for which he was later awarded an OBE.

[16] In Canada (1952–54) he prepared plans for Iroquois New Town on the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario which were also not implemented (the design was awarded to others).

Coates began coming back to Canada in the early 1950s, about the time of the Iroquois project, finally settling there in 1957.

[2] Coates' daughter, Laura Cohn, published a biography of her father called The Door to a Secret Room (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1999) ISBN 1-84014-695-8.