Houses

Houses by Margaret and Alexander Potter is a lovely book. The cover isn’t really a seller, too detailed and worthy in text and dull in colour to make you have to have it. But if you get past that, the super illustrations on the inside make it worth hanging around.

They must have printed a lot of copies this book. It’s still pretty cheap, cheaper than the Potter’s Puffin Picture book A History of the Countryside. Mine is a first edition from 1948. It smells divine and old bookish but has its dust wrapper ‘intact’ and is in nice condition overall, as the book sellers write.

It really is a bigger version of those Puffin books as far as content goes. Part of a series titled: The Changing Shape of Things, Houses is a ‘story told mainly in drawings…houses shown actively occupied, and a significant part of the commentary consists in what the occupants are doing, as well as the clothes they wear and the furniture that surrounds them.’

The book starts with ‘Early Mediaeval Homes of the Wealthy’ and ends on ‘A Borough Council Housing Estate 1947.’ And the earlier social‘commentary mutates into architectural technical writing by the end. Presumably because Alexander Potter was by now in his comfort zone and couldn’t resist.

The drawings are very dolls-house like. My favourite, detailed here, is the isometric cut away of ‘A Reinforced Concrete Framed House, 1939.’ The man of the house is seen in his bentwood chair reading (Architectural Review?), an artist scratching his chin in his roof top studio, the ladies serving dinner (surely on a Ravilious design?) in their dining area, alongside a windowsill chock-a-block with architecturally sanctioned cacti. It all reminds me of Ernő Goldfinger’s pad on Willow Road in Hampstead.

The husband and wife team of Margaret and Alexander Potter make for interesting reading, what reading there is about them. She the illustrator, he the architect, with some inevitable blurring of those boundaries as they lived and worked together.