A live/work house and studio in Belsize Park designed by the late architect Georgie Wolton has received a Grade II listing from Historic England.
Many of its original elements remain, including sliding wooden walls and a raised fireplace in the centre of the living room.
Wolton designed the house between 1975 and 1976 as a home and studio for her family and her independent practice.
She had previously co-founded the Team 4 architecture practice alongside Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Su Brumwell and her sister Wendy Cheeseman.
As Team 4's only fully qualified architect in 1963, she was pivotal to its early operation. As the stronger draughtsman of the two, she often completed Rogers' sketches for him.
Preferring to work alone, she left to form her own practice after a few months – another pioneering move as women-led architecture practices were even rarer in the Post War period.
“In Georgie Wolton’s generation, architecture was largely a man’s world,” said Catherine Croft, director of the C20 Society.
“Building her own home exactly as she wanted it, could be seen as a subversive and powerfully feminist act.”
Wolton was particularly interested in designing living spaces that could double as workspaces and designed her own home accordingly.
Bespoke timber shutters were added in order to partition of sections of the almost T-shaped house, along with conservatory-style antechambers.
Wolton described these elements as “pause spaces” to allow her to more easily separate her work and home life.
Hidden behind a boundary wall on Belsize Lane, the single-storey home is built from brick and glass.
Glazed rooflights allow light to filter in from above, while windows look out onto three courtyard gardens and a pond.
While Wolton wanted plenty of views of the outdoors, she also included expanses of plain brick wall to better hang and display her collection of Turkish kilim rugs.
In her later career she specialised as a landscape architect.
She created schemes for her longtime friend Rogers – who met his wife Ruth Rogers at Wolton’s home at 34 Belsize Lane.
Rogers designed the River Café in Hammersmith for his chef wife, and Wolton created the planting scheme.
But 34 Belsize Lane is a vanishingly rare example of Wolton’s architectural work.
Fieldhouse, an experimental home she built in Surrey in 1968 in the style of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, was amongst the first houses in the UK to use corten steel as a building material.
The house was dismantled in 1993 and is reportedly still in storage.
Luckily, 34 Belsize Lane is still intact, although now fairly dilapidated.
Its current occupants have hired east London-based practice Ebba Architects to carefully renovate the house and restore it to its former glory – a process the studio is documenting on Instagram.
“Georgie Wolton's buildings are little-known, but she made an important contribution to post-war Modernism in England,” said Tom Foxall, regional director at Historic England.
“The building is a meticulously conceived studio house which creatively integrates into its setting and meets the high threshold for listing.”
Its Grade II status – which provides special protection to historic and significant buildings – was awarded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, on the advice of Historic England.
The listing of 34 Belsize Lane was supported by the C20 Society, an organisation that campaigns for the preservation of 20th-century architecture.
