New Heathbrow

In 1958 Higgins Ney and Partners was commissioned to design a family house located in London's leafy northern suburb of Hampstead. Such opportunities were rare in post-war Britain and gave my father, Hal Higgins, a welcome break from the firm’s normal diet of public housing projects. Working closely with his partner, Peter Ney, he developed a design that interweaved the then-popular Brutalist aesthetic with the planning philosophy of Richard Neutra, his architectural hero, resulting in a uniquely British version of mid-century modernism.

It received significant coverage at the time, including a lengthy review by Trevor Dannatt in Architectural Design (April 1961). He writes that “the combination of English ‘vernacular’ material brick (for its quality of permanence and long lasting association with domestic building) with the constructional facilities of modern structure and precision-made industrial components, is deliberate…this principle underlies the design of all detail work in Heathbrow.” The house also featured in Ian Nairn’s ‘Modern Buildings in London’ (1964), where the writer is lyrical about its qualities: “If Mies van der Rohe went back to putting up brick houses they might well look like this. The front almost windowless, the few openings long and vertical slits with concrete lintels.”

Some sixty years later the client’s son decided to build a house in a similar style, but this time in the equally leafy suburbs of New Jersey. He wanted to create an environment that reminded him of his childhood home, using the same combination of solidity and transparency that characterized the original.

When I was approached to take on this task, I was hesitant. I wasn’t sure I could do justice to my father’s design ethos without it becoming an empty stylistic device or tired ‘MCM’ cliché. On the other hand, it did offer a personal opportunity to celebrate my father following his death in 2011, and cement, in a very physical way, his long love affair with the United States.

Before starting the project I wanted to discover what qualities the client admired in the old family home. High on his list was the contrast between permeability and solidity. The new house was to have a similarly windowless front façade, providing a powerful delineation between outside and inside. At the same time it should have large areas of glazing in the living space to give expansive views of the landscaped grounds, which reminded him of Hampstead Heath. The client was also adamant that this should be a family home. Even though his children were grown up he wanted the house to serve as a base, or perhaps a place of refuge, for a future extended family. Over the course of the project additional rooms were added to reinforce this intention, including a games space, home cinema, pool and Jacuzzi.

The focus of the new house is the Great Room, which began as a close approximation to the living room of the old home. However its size grew as the project developed, led by a desire to create a space with the same sense of volume that he had experienced as a young child.

Inevitably the scale and intent of the house began to distance the new design from its London starting point. There is certainly an equivalence of materials and a style of detailing, including the use of sand-cast bricks imported from the UK. The new home also has a similar response to its surroundings, part private and part open. However, the inclusion of the central courtyard gives the house a more introspective character, reflective of its East Coast setting and our 21st century concern with domestic security.

GENERAL PROJECT DATA

Gross internal floor area
10,225 sq.ft. (950 sq.m.) excluding garage and courtyard

Gross (internal + external) floor area
12,405 sq.ft. (1,152 sq.m.) including garage (800 sq.ft/74... sq.m.), central courtyard (560 sq.ft./52 sq.m.) and bedroom balcony (240 sq.ft./22 sq.m.)

Architect:
CODA Projects LLC
1625 Robinson Avenue
San Diego, CA 92103 (Supervising Architect: Matthew Higgins)

Executive Architects, M&E and Structural Engineers:
Jarmel Kizel Architects and Engineers, Inc.
42 Okner Parkway
Livingston, NJ 07039 (Project Architect: Mike Vorland)

Other consultants:
Civil Engineers: Casey & Keller Inc., 258 Main Street, Millburn, NJ, 07041
Lighting: Robert Newell Lighting, 654 North Avenue West, Westfield, NJ, 07090
Aluminum Framing: KJP Enterprise Inc., 200 Keen Street, Paterson, NJ, 07524

Main contractor:
Bronstein Construction Inc., 5 Richard Drive, Short Hills, NJ, 07078

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Photo Credit Key:
(HH) Hal Higgins
(MH) Matthew Higgins
(JF) John Frankel