In his acclaimed autobiographical book about life in rural Wales, The Garden in the Clouds, the writer Antony Woodward talks about his upbringing at this house in Chewton Mendip, which was commissioned by his parents:

“The house was my father's Great Modernist Experiment, the product of his love of architecture in general and Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion in particular. In time for my arrival in 1963, they needed to add onto my mother's cottage, which had only one bedroom and a wide landing where Jonny slept. My father devised a contemporary solution. Modules precision-machined off-site by Vic Hallam, the Nottinghamshire company made famous by its pre-fabricated classrooms, were bolted to a pre-formed, cantilevered concrete deck. Twenty-eight polished Ilminster stone steps led up from the poky cottage's front door to an airy, light-filled, flat-roofed glass box, containing sitting room and bedrooms. These were furnished accordingly: razor-edged steel-and glass coffee table, brick-hard, angle-iron and foam-rubber Hille sofas, Ercol bentwood table and chairs... And so Modernism made its brazen progress from Bauhaus Germany, via New York, to our ancient Mendip lane. Nothing like it had been seen before in rural Somerset…

The patio arrived in Phase Two of the Great Modernist Experiment, an extension forced upon us by my mother's riding accident almost a decade later. It was my father's most successful garden space, enclosed on three sides by the house, and on the fourth by the rising ground of the hill. It was, as he'd intended it, an astonishing suntrap. In raised dry-stone beds he'd planted acers, a green one with broad leaves and a couple with more dissected leaves in red and bright green. I ran my hand along one of the smooth, shapely branches. After thirty years the trees were sculptural, contributing a calming, vaguely Japanese air to the space that set off the severity of the square brutalist concrete pond and the glass and cedar of the house.

During the Modernist years, my father had maintained the pond with its floor of raked pea shingle, in a state of stark clinical perfection, washing it clean of algae several times a summer so the water never clouded.”