EXAMPLES of classic modern architecture can turn up in unexpected places: one of the best is at Shipbourne, a few miles north of Tonbridge in Kent. This is the Woodhouse, designed by E. Maxwell Fry and Walter Gropius in 1936 — the same year they created the Levy House in Chelsea, and one which brought a great deal of publicity. What makes a comparison of the pair so interesting is that one, the Woodhouse, is inspired by its purely rural setting, the other by the effect of being in a city. The former has a rambling approach of walls, hedges and other structures leading to the house with a wonderful dark wooden top, while the London house, white, Cubist and simple (unfortunately spoilt by others), is forced by its situation to be compact.

Another example of the fine tradition to which Woodhouse and Levy belonged is also in Kent, this time in Tunbridge Wells and designed by Matthew Wintersgill, a London architect. It was finished only two years ago, yet is like a flashback to the freshness, simplicity and modesty of the early period inspired by the likes of Le Corbusier and Berthold Lubetkin. Among the rows of ordinary suburban houses there suddenly appears above a hedge, the clean white lines of vintage modern architecture. White was the most memorable hallmark of the Cubist revolution and Wintersgill misses no opportunity to use it as part of the aesthetic form in long windows, thin black frames, an opening to a sundeck.

In the suburban surroundings, Wintersgill’s work does just this. Again, it is compact, yet the pleasure of your first glimpse of this unusual house is sustained throughout. The path to the front door with its surrounding glass bricks (a throwback to their origins at the Maison de Verre in Paris of the 1920s) follows the curving white wall screening the front garden, a device that maintains the interior privacy. Once inside, there is the surprise of a total contrast — all is space: the possibility of this compact building being disturbingly constricting vanishes as if by sleight of hand. It is perhaps not surprising to hear that, before starting his own practice, Wintersgill worked for Powell and Moya, whom many regarded as the most interesting and inventive English architects of the second half of the 20th century. While they loved magical effects of the kind seen here, this is entirely a Wintersgill house and as such a real find. His tricks with space are managed simply, in effect by removing walls where they have no structural purpose and, in a similar manner, by leaving sections of ceiling open, the first introducing lateral space, the second, vertical. “I tried to have as few doors as possible,” he said, “because they only get in the way.”