Journal
A trip to East Croydon, via Bern, Switzerland
Part 1

I decided to take a couple of days off work this week. My idea of fun and recreation was a trip to East Croydon today. Yep. 

A year-and-a-half ago or so I visited Siedlung Halen in Bern by architects Atelier 5, for my forthcoming Modernist Estates Europe book (incidentally you can already pre-order it on Amazon, but it’s not even at the printers yet, so I feel it’s a little premature/tempting fate, but fill your boots if you are that way inclined). Anyway, I had the opportunity to meet Hans Hostettler, one of the original architects who  still lives in the Siedlung with his wife today. 

As well as showing me around his home (see pictures) he also told me about their project in Croydon. It’s always seemed a bit baffling that they designed a scheme there, and even though I kept meaning to, I’d never been. So anyway, today was the day. I’ll split this blog post into two parts. First part about Halen, second on Croydon.

So Halen, I’ll let Mr Hostettler tell the story:

“Mr Pini [Alfredo Pini, another of the founding members of Atelier 5] and I went on an old Lambretta to visit the farmer who owned some land outside Bern, and we asked him if we could buy a small piece of it to build five houses for ourselves. He told us it’s either all or nothing, and that was the beginning of Siedlung Halen.”

There are 78 houses in total, five of which were designed for four of the Atelier 5 architects and Niklaus Morgenthaler — Atelier 5’s engineer, they each have adjoining architects’ studios.

“Before building Halen, we built Flamatt 1 [1957–58, see picture] — a row of 5 prototype houses and a studio. Every architect at that time was visiting Marseille — Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, and we used the exact measurements of his Modulor theory. When the houses in Flamatt were finished we went to live in them with our families for a month — to test what was good about them and what wasn’t quite working. We realised the Modulor dimensions were very small for normal people! Mr Ernst Göhner, who was financing the Halen project, wanted us to make all the proportions a bit bigger in Halen. In the end we changed the height to 2.30 metres, as opposed to Corb’s 2.26 metres. But everything else is the Modulor dimensions.”

Mr Hostettler doesn’t live in one of the five ‘atelier houses’, he lives in one at the end of a row. There are two types of layout — with a width of either 4 or 5 metres. I can’t remember which his is…

“We moved in to Halen in January 1960. My family with our two little girls aged 3 and 4. Our house is still all original, we haven’t changed anything. The kitchen is all as it was. All the other houses in Halen have updated their kitchens as families have changed etc. and I don’t care, as long as there is one house that is exactly as how we designed it. For me it’s the best kitchen I have ever seen. It is completely practical. It was designed by a young girl who came to do an apprenticeship at Atelier 5, and she ended up working with us for 30 or 40 years — she designed every kitchen. She was a brilliant cook, and her design was completely functional. I saw her the other day, she’s in her eighties now, but I told her that my kitchen she designed is still my favourite. It’s small but you can have two people working in it quite well.” 

The houses are arranged over three floors, with the kitchen and living space on the entrance level, and two bedrooms upstairs and another bedroom downstairs. 

“When we moved here the two girls shared the bedroom downstairs, and we were upstairs. The idea was that as the children grow up they would then move upstairs and get a bedroom each, and we moved downstairs. Now, upstairs, I use one of the rooms as my working room, and another as a guest bedroom. I also have some very simple furniture in there that I designed. In 1950–52 I worked in Paris for André Sive, and we were designing a lot of low cost houses and furniture for the post-war population. I also worked with Jean Prouvé on the aluminium houses at Meudon at that time.”

The lower ground floor of the house opens out to a private garden

“We spend nearly all out time in this room. Upstairs is for cooking and eating, but me and my wife love reading so we we have all our books here, and read, read, read! We also have a little shower room down here. Everything is how it was originally. It needs a little paint, but at my age I’m not going to do anything!

Outside there is set of stairs that lead from the living room all the way down to the garden, so you don’t have to come though this bedroom. The design of the stairs is actually based on an old Finnish design — they usually have them in wood, but we made them in concrete here. It works very well, neither I nor my children have ever fallen off them! Outside in the garden I have a little plant house that I designed. I got the idea for the design from a bicycle hangar.”

Next door to Halen is Thalmatt I, where I stayed in an Airbnb when I visited, it was designed 15 years after Halen and has 18 houses, there is Thalmatt II up the road, which was designed in 1985, and has 37 dwellings

“What was amazing in the early days of Atelier 5 is that very project we did, we would stay there and test it out, learn from it and make the next one better. We paid particular attention to things like sound insulation, we tweaked the design of the staircase for example to make the minimum amount of noise. 

At the beginning of Halen we had a very strong community. Atelier 5 were responsible for selling all the houses, so we would show clients around and talk them through everything. When people moved in we knew everyone because of this direct contact we had had with them. Now it’s a bit more ‘open’, some people have died or moved away, but me and my wife hope to live out the rest of our lives here.”

… Croydon tomorrow (or Sunday) … 

—
Archive image Flamatt I from Atelier 5’s website
The other images were taken on my iPhone rather badly, so apologies for that.
You may be wondering why I have included the bath, well the side of the bath is a radiator. Genius idea.
Then there’s the swimming pool (it was autumn) and plan and section drawing of the houses.