“When the slabs went down on the first 21 houses Wates held a celebratory party. It was 1968, and it was a funny, crazy event. We had Swiss music, there were girls with Swiss flag miniskirts and a lot of Swiss cheese and cheddar, there was beer and Guinness…” Hans Hostettler, founding member of Atelier 5.

Atelier 5 was founded in 1955 by Erwin Fritz, Samuel Gerber, Rolf Hesterberg, Hans Hostettler and Alfredo Pini (and later Niklaus Morgenthaler). Four of the five founding members worked together in the studio of Hans Brechbühler, who had in turn studied under Le Corbusier in the 1930s. Without enough work in the older architect’s office, the group began looking for opportunities for their own designs, along with Samuel Gerber, who had recently returned from studying the landscape designer Burle Marx in Brazil.

Initially, they intended to build houses for themselves and their families, but after approaching the owner of a large site in the rolling countryside overlooking the Aare River just outside Bern in Switzerland, their ideas quickly turned to a larger residential project. The resulting Halen Estate, built in 1961, has become the canonical prototype for low-rise, high-density housing in the last half of the 20th Century. The houses at St Bernards in Croydon are very much influenced by this earlier design.

Atelier 5’s project at Halen is known as a Siedlung, or housing development, which speaks to Swiss modern Movement ideals and more traditional ideas of villages and towns. Seventy-eight houses were finished, including those for the architects themselves (some of which still live there). The design follows Le Corbusier’s Modular theory, which the members tested on their own families. They devised are two simple types of layout, which are set across three stories on a narrow four or five-metre profile. With car-free walkways, the site is an urban oasis in the countryside. Two annexes, Thalmatt I and Thalmatt II, were later added.

The houses follow many of the same principles as those at Halen, reproduced, however, in London Stock brick rather than concrete. Notably, both groups of houses are private at a communal and individual level. The stepped levels are surrounded by mature trees that are older than the buildings, with views outwards rather than over the neighbours.

Hans Hostettler explains how the group’s only design in the United Kingdom, St Bernards, came about: “The scheme in Croydon was the result of a competition. Wates, who were one of the biggest housing developers in the UK, invited us to enter. The brief was for 280 houses in a plot of land that had 300 mature trees. They stipulated that we had to retain 250 of them. So we designed the houses, with little spaces around them with the trees and so on. We won the completion and got invited to London to present our drawings. Our meeting was at 9 am, and we presented our plans. We had all different types of houses —small ones, large ones, larger ones still, all kinds. We had to do all our drawings in UK measurements, in feet and inches! We had to learn quickly!’’

The estate was built and commissioned by The Wates Company in 1969-70 as part of a wider development scheme in the Park Hill area. As an established family builder, they completed several post-war housing developments in London and the south of England at the time, including the large Dulwich Estate. Unfortunately, only the first phase of the Atelier 5 estate at Park Hill was built, leaving a group of only twenty-one houses. The surrounding houses of the same era follow more traditional building styles, as most were designed by Wates’ less experimental in-house team.

Atelier 5 continue as a renowned architectural practice that, although no longer run by its founders, is closely connected to its roots. Their enduring ethos of the importance of the collective over the individual is evident in their buildings, including St Bernards.