Not everyone wanted Tom Broughton to buy the flat he now lives in. The tenant who was there when he viewed it three years ago said, “You don’t want to live here. It’s freezing. It’s mouldy. You can’t hang pictures.” Broughton’s surveyor “strongly recommended” that he didn’t go through with the purchase. And his parents were similarly baffled: “You’re spending how much on a one-bedroom, ex-council flat?” But Broughton persisted. “I couldn’t not,” he says.
The flat is on the fifth floor of the Isokon building, a sculptural, concrete behemoth in north London that is viewed as a modernist masterpiece. Design-led estate agency The Modern House called it “one of the most important penthouses in London.” Broughton didn’t need convincing. He had spent more than a decade obsessing over the building, its history, its contents, and the lives lived within it.
