Timeline
Twenty years ago, The Modern House was a mere kernel of an idea; today, it is widely recognised as the UK’s leading design-led estate agency. This timeline shows some of the key events, people and places that have shaped the company.
August 2004
Albert Hill is the Architecture & Design Editor at Wallpaper magazine under founder Tyler Brûlé. He learns of a real-estate agency in Florida specialising in the sale of mid-century modern houses and decides to fly out and investigate. Surely something like this couldn’t work in the UK, could it?
October 2004
Albert calls his old friend Matt Gibberd, who is a Senior Editor at The World of Interiors magazine, and moots the idea of a design-led estate agency. The Modern House is formed, inspired by FRS Yorke’s influential book of the same name.
January 2005
The Modern House wins its inaugural instruction: Six Pillars in Dulwich, designed by Valentine Harding, a partner at Tecton. It happens to be one of the finest early modern movement houses in Britain. Six Pillars receives unprecedented press coverage all over the world, and the phone starts to ring rather a lot.
March 2005
Matt and Albert acquire themselves a complete set of the Architects’ Journal on eBay, and gather as many vintage architecture books as they can lay their hands on. These form the basis for a painstakingly researched database of the UK’s finest modern housing, perhaps the most comprehensive of its kind in existence.
October 2005
The Modern House holds an open day at a single-storey courtyard house on a 1970s estate in Buckinghamshire. A bidding war ensues. Modernism is officially in demand.
January 2006
The Telegraph Magazine publishes a full-page profile on Matt and Albert. “Hill and Gibberd delight in tracking down properties and provide excellent photographs and brochures,” writes Annabel Freyberg. “The current roster is impressive, including the artist Jake Chapman’s Spitalfields house with its David Adjaye interior, a Suffolk bolthole by Michael Hopkins (plus fabulous Modernist dovecote), and a single-storey house by Jonathan Ellis-Miller with views of Ely Cathedral.”
April 2006
Another profile follows in Wallpaper* magazine. Albert and Matt are photographed outside one of Britain’s finest examples of streamline moderne architecture, the romantically named Stillness, in Kent. They sell the house shortly thereafter.
September 2006
The Modern House enters a five-a-side football team into the “Estate Agents Cup”, a tournament lacking in apostrophes as well as professionalism. The team is defeated in the quarter-final when the goalkeeper decides to play up front.
October 2006
An office trip is organised to Liverpool, centering on a visit to the city’s Catholic cathedral, designed in the 1960s by Matt’s grandfather, Sir Frederick Gibberd. So begins a series of annual architectural pilgrimages to great Modernist buildings around the country.
February 2007
Designed by Peter Foggo and David Thomas in 1963, Space House in West Sussex is one of the few buildings in Britain that stands comparison with California’s celebrated Case Study houses. The house is published in the February issue of Vogue, and sells in March.
May 2007
Another of the UK’s great Modernist masterpieces is sold following a flurry of offers: Long Wall in Suffolk, designed by Sir Philip Dowson. The buyer is one of the UK’s most successful architects, who recognises its rarity.
August 2007
The Modern House sells its first span house, on the Cator estate in Blackheath. Designed by the architect Eric Lyons, these elegantly detailed homes on landscaped estates throughout southern England prove immensely popular. In the ensuing years, the agency goes on to sell properties on virtually every Span estate.
March 2008
The Modern House completes its most high-profile sale to date: The Lost House in King’s Cross, a brooding, experimental living space designed by David Adjaye.
August 2008
The agency moves to a new office building overlooking the Regent’s Canal in Islington, with architects and ducks for company.
November 2008
Augustus John’s former studio in Hampshire sells to a prominent sculptor, a fitting example of art and architecture’s constant communion.
December 2008
GQ magazine includes The Modern House in its list of “100 Best Things in the World”. It writes, “Their USP isn’t just an extensive expertise in Britain’s rich architectural heritage, but also an enduring affection for the best in 21st-century building design.”
January 2009
It doesn’t matter what the economic climate is like, an outstanding property put in front of the right people will always sell quickly. A converted warehouse in the middle of Borough market is snapped up overnight, shortly followed by the 1960s house Ansty Plum, in Wiltshire, with its wonderfully dramatic pitched roof.
January 2010
The budget for the annual office trip has gone up, and a visit to snowy Berlin is on the agenda. Sporting an array of novelty hats, the team visits Le Corbusier’s Unité and Oscar Niemeyer’s Interbau Apartment House. Flats in both buildings reveal themselves to be remarkably cheap, and at least one person considers emigration.
August 2010
Albert discusses modern houses with Norman Foster while riding in the architect’s Dymaxion, a futuristic three-wheeled car originally designed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1930s.
November 2010
The Modern House completes the sale of Britain’s earliest – and arguably greatest – Modern Movement property, High & Over.
June 2011
The only house in the UK by the great Bauhaus architect and designer Marcel Breuer is sold to a fashion designer.
December 2011
The team takes a trip to Utrecht to see Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroder House.
March 2012
The agency is given its first flat to sell in Highpoint, Berthold Lubetkin’s 1930s masterpiece in Highgate. It is sold within days, and so begins a happy affiliation, with prices in the building rising by more than 20% in 18 months off the back of sales by The Modern House.
July 2013
Matt Gibberd and Albert Hill are invited to be the architecture experts for The Telegraph’s new website and magazine. Their column, which focuses on high-end architecture across the world, is published online every fortnight.
August 2013
The Modern House completes the sale of the late John Winter’s seminal house in Highgate. Built in the 1960s and clad in CorTen steel, it is one of only a small handful of private houses to be given a Grade II* listing by English Heritage.
November 2013
Albert is invited to participate in the International Iconic Houses Europe Symposium at the V&A. Alongside the directors of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugenhadt and more, he discusses how to safeguard the future of modern houses and communicate their importance to the public.
May 2014
The Modern House sells Slip House designed by Carl Turner, winner of the Manser Medal for Britain’s best contemporary house.
October 2014
A house in London sells to a former winner of the Turner Prize. The Modern House has now worked with a total of 16 nominees and winners of this prestigious award.
March 2015
To coincide with its 10th anniversary, The Modern House launches a new website. The revised design reflects a company in maturity, and a brand with significant resonance well beyond the confines of estate agency.
August 2015
The journalist-turned-teacher Lucy Kellaway buys The Framehouse to become “the only person in the world who left [her] husband for a 20ft strip of orange Corian.” Lucy wrote about the experience of falling in love with architect Marcus Lee’s design in her book, Re-educated: How I changed my job, my home, my husband and my hair.
October 2015
The Modern House acquires new premises in Islington, north London. The office is furnished with vintage Eames chairs, Hans Wegner lights, and handmade desks by the Turner Prize-winning architects Assemble.
December 2015
An eponymous book about The Modern House is published, featuring a curated selection of its most iconic houses.
June 2016
The agency is instructed to sell Raymond McGrath’s St. Ann’s Court – one of the finest and most iconic houses to have been built in Britain in the first half of the 20th century.
July 2016
The Spaces magazine include The Modern House in their feature ‘The seven best websites for Modernist real estate’. “If ever an estate agent has raised the bar for selling property, it’s The Modern House.”
July 2016
The Modern House partner with The Serpentine Galleries to market four specially-commissioned Summer Houses, part of the institution’s internationally renowned annual Architecture Programme.
September 2016
The team take a trip to Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, to explore British architect Peter Aldington’s Turn End.
September 2016
The agency is instructed to market Jørn Utzon’s 1962 Ahm House, described by The Sunday Times architecture critic Hugh Pearman as “probably the best Modern house in the world”.
September 2016
The Modern House win two awards at the inaugural Archiboo Web Awards – one for ‘Best Written Content’ and another for ‘Best Overall Experience’.
October 2016
The Modern House hosts ‘Cape Cod Modern’, a sell-out talk by Peter McMahon, at the AA Schools, London, in association with the Twentieth Century Society.
December 2016
The agency is instructed by Turner-Prize winning architectural collective Assemble to market their much-admired Yardhouse studio.
May 2017
The team braves the elements on a trip to explore Skene Catling de la Pena’s Flint House and Windmill Hill in Buckinghamshire.
June 2017
Phaidon publish Ornament is Crime, a visual manifesto offering a celebration and thought-provoking reappraisal of modernist architecture, written by The Modern House’s founding directors Matt and Albert.
July 2017
The Modern House completes the sale of the iconic Ahm House in Harpenden.
January 2018
The Modern House complete the sale of Peter Womersley’s Klein House in the Scottish Borders. Commissioned in 1957 by the renowned textile design, Bernat Klein, it was sold in remarkable original condition by Bernat’s daughter, Shelley, who wrote about her experience of growing up there in her memoir, ‘The See-Through House.’
September 2018
The Modern House move to St Alphege, a former church hall in Southwark reimagined by TDO Architecture.
November 2018
Designed and built in the early 60s by the architect Brain Housden for himself and his family, Housden House is known as one of the great post-war modern homes in London. This “completely unique piece of architectural vision and ingenuity” (according to Historic England) sells for the first time in November.
December 2018
Four members of the team decamp to Dungeness for the night to experience Fiona Naylor’s Pump Station – one of five projects she has completed on this weather-beaten headland in Kent.
December 2018
The Modern House sell one of the most important penthouses in London on the top floor of the Grade I-listing Isokon Building. The founder of Cubitts, Tom Boughton, becomes the new custodian of these perfectly preserved plywood interiors.
July 2019
The Modern House launches its first film series on YouTube. Today, the channel has close to 250,000 subscribers with the most popular film – a tour of architect Barbara Weiss’s Upside-Down House – reaching just shy of 2 million views.
July 2019
In the mid-60s, architect Walter Segal demolished his second wife’s Victorian villa in Highgate, north London to make space for a different kind of dwelling. The simple plan and minimal detailing of their new family home – where he worked and lived until his death in 1985 – is typical of Segal’s work. The sale of this house was complete in the summer of 2019.
September 2019
The Modern House complete the sale of Beach House – a single-storey dwelling built in the 1970s in the middle of Shingle Street, Suffolk that is widely considered to be architect John Penn’s masterpiece.
January 2020
The Modern House launches its first podcast. Hosted by co-founder, Matt Gibberd, each episode invites guests from the worlds of design, architecture and the creative industries to discuss the ways in which home holds significance in their lives. John Pawson, Ruth Rogers, India Mahdavi and Michael Craig-Martin are just some of the guests to take part in the project.
September 2020
The Modern House sell Goetre, the raddle-red home of TOAST founders, Jessica and Jamie Seaton. As viewers queue to see this lovingly crafted, 19th-century farmhouse in rural Carmarthenshire, a gap in the market appears …
January 2021
The Modern House expands to incorporate listings of the finest period homes in Britain. Featuring Victorian cottages to Georgian dower houses and everything in between, Inigo becomes the go-to site for characterful, historic homes across the country.
September 2021
The Modern House achieves B-Corp status – a term used to describe businesses that have proven they’re dedicated to doing better; to ensure they meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.
October 2021
Matt Gibberd’s book, A Modern Way to Live, is published by Penguin. The central idea behind the book is that good design is timeless, and that the principles of space, light, materials, nature and decoration can be applied to any living space at any scale. Described as “revolutionary in its simplicity, and full of elegance, humour and joy,” it is now a staple on the shelves of the design-savvy.
October 2022
Inigo complete the sale of Boxall House, the Grade II-listed home of artist Julian Bell – Vanessa Bell’s grandson – and his wife, Jenny.
March 2023
Co-founders Matt Gibberd and Albert Hill are selected to join the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) as Honorary Fellows. The fellowships are awarded every year to individuals who have “made a significant contribution to architecture but are not architects.” This includes people who have shaped the design world and the built environment for the better, with sustainability and the future of younger generations at the forefront of their minds.
June 2023
This four-storey Princelet Street town house is sold in the coveted Brick Lane and Fournier Street Conservation Area. Once a thriving Huguenot community, it was built by an eminent carpenter, Samuel Worrall, in the 1720s.
August 2023
Co-founder Albert Hill joins the jury for the RIBA House of the Year 2023. The award is given to the best new house designed by an architect in the UK. As juror, Albert visited six shortlisted projects before casting his vote for Green House – a generous five-bedroom family home designed and built on a budget by Hayhurst & Co Architects.
October 2023
The Modern House complete the sale of Sliding House – a radical and responsive home designed by Alex de Rijke.
October 2023
Inigo market a chocolate-box cottage belonging to fashion designer, Roland Mouret. “I designed this house in the same way I design my clothes,” he told Inigo at the time. “I wanted to create a space that accepts us, that celebrates us, that makes us feel our very best.”
February 2024
The Modern House launches is first mini-documentary on YouTube – a half-hour film exploring the architect, Simon Allford’s extraordinary house in the sky. Presented by co-founder, Matt Gibberd, each episode will explore the design principles of space, light, materials, nature and decoration through the homes of designers, architects and creatives.
March 2024
“An old house may be built of the humblest, simplest materials, and, like a bird’s nest, be a thing of great beaty,” wrote the author, artist and environmentalist Roger Deakin of his home, Walnut Tree Farm. Inigo’s sale of his “thing of great beauty” was completed in March.
May 2024
The Modern House website now attracts more than 3.5 million unique visitors per year. We are the most followed estate agency in the world on social media, reaching a million people every week.