epw044254 ENGLAND (1934). High and Over House and Water Tower, Amersham, 1934

This whole area is now covered with 1960s housing development

HIGH AND OVER Highover Park, Amersham, Buckinghamshire HP7 0BN Grade 2* listed building - English Heritage Building ID: 414978 Country house, now divided into two dwellings. 1930 by Amyas D Connell for Bernard Ashmole, Professor of Classical Archaeology at London University. Concrete frame, infilled with cavity wall construction externally of brick and with concrete block internally. Y-shaped plan designed to catch the sun and views across the Misbourne valley, with hexagonal centrepiece incorporating main and garden entrances and projecting staircase. Two storeys with partial basement, a third nursery floor over servants' wing gives on to flat roof with concrete canopies over. Of outstanding importance as the first truly convincing essay in the international style in England, one of only two buildings included in the exhibition `The International Style' held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, under the curatorship of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932. It is the first work by Connell, who with Basil Ward and Colin Lucas formed the most important architectural practice designing modern movement houses in the inter-war period. The water tower and fives court have been demolished. The Modernist garden has been obliterated by a 60s housing development. The family moved out of High & Over in the 1950s and it was then bought by D L Mays, the Punch cartoonist. In 1962 or 1963 it was bought by Frank Briggs, an architect, who split the house to accommodate two families. It was not then a listed building. Both parts of the house were bought by a couple, who are restoring the house and have reinstated the original floor-plans. The “Sun Houses”:- There are four reinforced concrete houses built against the hillside by the same architect as High & Over and listed grade II.

Now demolished