An upside-down apartment within Sir Roger Walters’ 1960s modernist building, Perronet House, in Elephant and Castle, south London
As chief architect of the Greater London Council, Sir Richard Walters has a roster of rather impressive accolades under his belt. He significantly influenced the architecture of post-war London, leading projects such as the redevelopment of Covent Garden and the Thames Barrier. But, naturally, we’re even more interested in his housing developments – and, in our opinion, Perronet House has to be one of his finest.
Perronet House, commissioned by GLC, was built for Southwark Council in 1969. It was part of a wave of change of Elephant and Castle: the area was being redeveloped – just as it is again today – with the construction of the roundabout and underground in 1958. Boissevain & Osmond’s much-missed shopping centre, the country’s first of its fully enclosed design, followed in 1965. In the spring of 1970, the very first residents moved into Perronet House.
The modernist block, which looks over the roundabout, is an exemplar case of Walters’ work. While high-rise buildings were going up all over the city in the mid-20th century, Walters dismissed their towering structures and made a case for more subtle designs. He went for gold with Perronet House: in 1971, it won a commendation in the Good Design in Housing awards for its boldness and conviction. We’re still waiting for it to receive its much-deserved listed status.
Now, let’s go inside. As fans of modernism, we can’t help but swoon over the original bare-brick interior and characterful tiling of the communal hallways you pass to reach the apartment. What a wonderful home it is, too: the white walls are a blank canvas for any future owner, while the bamboo flooring, sky-blue kitchen and original steel-framed Crittall windows provide the personality. And let’s talk about those windows: forget ‘room with a view’; here it’s the whole apartment, from which you can see the London Eye, the Shard and the BT Tower, among many other landmarks.
But our real highlight is the configuration of the space. The split-level apartment is built to a clever upside-down, with the bedrooms on the building’s eighth floor, and the living space upstairs on the tenth. (It’s also somewhat scissor-shaped – the intervening ninth floor is a staircase.) And we’re very much into it: the east-facing living space is flooded with beautiful morning sunshine, while the west-facing bedrooms get breathtaking views of the sunset over the London skyline. The very definition, then, of best of both.
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