Designed in 1960 by Miles Warren for his parents, this house is the best known of a series of projects later dubbed the “Pixie” houses. Picking up on both historical cottage patterns and then contemporary Danish models, these houses were composed of crisp boxes of concrete block, with punched openings and no eaves or verges on their gabled roofs. At the M.B. Warren House, each main room is surmounted by a steeply-pitched wooden roof– this breaking down of the house into small volumes, each with its own roof. An idea later extended by Ian Athfield and Roger Walker (creating what came to be described as the “noddy” and “pixie” houses).

Text by Andrew Barrie