For Laura Watts, the best thing about her parents’ house, with its striking early 70s design, was always the woodland which surrounds it. “It’s a bit like a treehouse, with enormous windows,” she says. “Crows used to peck on the windows and wake us up in the mornings. You’d see deer walking by, and rabbits. There were lots of tiny frogs at the pond. It was a wildlife house, really.”
While Watts and her siblings were climbing trees and fighting imaginary bears outside, their parents Celia and William Goodhart might have been preparing to hobnob with politicians and academics in their “wacky country house” three miles southwest of Oxford.
The sloping modern home was designed by Celia’s brother-in-law, architect Hal Moggridge. A steep staircase, decorated with plaster fashioned to look like exposed cement, joins a diagonal hallway to connect the house’s six bedrooms and deliberately designed large spaces for entertaining.
William Goodhart – a human rights lawyer and Liberal Democrat politician – and his family are well connected. “There were plenty of debates,” says Watts, “especially with my uncle, a Conservative MP, who lived down the hill. But they usually avoided talking politics with him. They had different views and that was that.”
Moggridge was influenced in his design by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed that buildings should exist in harmony with their natural environments, as well as Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and famous structures of the era such as the Royal Festival Hall.
“At first the whole of the front of the house was going to be glass,” says Moggridge. “It was very fashionable at that time. But my parents were worried, completely rightly, about the brightness and overexposure. So the form of the house changed and the windows became holes punched into the wooden walls.”
The family didn’t just stumble on the secluded plot of land: it was once the site of a crumbling Victorian mansion that belonged to archaeologist Arthur Evans, which Watts’s grandfather, who lived next door, bought in an auction in the 1940s. “No one bid for it, apparently,” says Moggridge. “They had to demolish the big old house that Evans lived in; he wanted to give it to Oxford University, but they didn’t want it. It was rather derelict.”
The ambitious project remains one of only three houses created by Moggridge, who is now a landscape architect. “It was the biggest real project I’d done,” he says. “The place was totally overgrown. When we first were surveying it, it was a matter of crawling through the undergrowth. My wife helped me, as I was a one-man band at the time.”
A lot of care was taken when it came to selecting the materials for the interiors, he adds. The exceptionally high wooden ceiling in the first-floor drawing room is made from Parana pine, while the concrete columns and beams were made by the same company which provided the materials to build St Catherine’s College in Oxford.
The elderly Goodharts lived in their home, known as Youlbury House, for years after they retired, and succeeded in having it grade II listed in 2009. Now they are moving out and the house is back on the market.
Watts still remembers the house fondly. “The built-in storage made fantastic hiding places and spaces to play in. We did spend a lot of our time playing in the airing cupboard.”
And while Moggridge says he is proud that his design has “weathered quite well”, it’s the long evenings spent putting the world to rights which stand out in his memory. “They had a lot of good parties which we were often invited to,” he recalls. “Even when there were just a few people we’d have a drink. They had some very interesting friends.”
