When the builders/developers were persuaded by contemporary enlightened opinion, typically expressed by architects and designers, that they should build houses in the moderné mode such houses were rejected by the public. The moderné movement in architecture and design in the 1930s was a fashion style. The ‘Village of Tomorrow’ in the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1934 comprised houses built by Wates, Morrells, Berg and others which were in the moderné style. Wells Coates was the architect commissioned by Lawrence Berg, and Arthur Kenyon by John W. Laing to produce contemporary designs which featured houses which +had rendered elevations and flat roofs. Despite extensive promotion, the style was not liked because it was considered too austere (96).
The Ideal Home catalogue for 1934 shows all houses in the show village to be flat-roofed and plain walled in both angular and flow-curved styles. They had smooth white walls and large steel windows designed in the contemporary sun-cult style. Flat-roofed houses were advertised as offering the advantages of ‘A whole floor of extra space, and delightful means to revel in the out-of-doors… to take your meals in the open, and… sleep al fresco”; all this at West Molesey for £395 from Howard Homes! (97)The copy-writers in the 1934 brochure described a Morrells house as ‘The sensation of the 1934 Show, the wide bay window gives the sun no chance of escape’ (98). Sir W. Lane, described as a famous health figure by John McDonald, a writer on architectural matters at the time, said ‘The roofs being flat they do not impede the entry of sunlight into the rooms of the houses opposite buildings to the same extent as do the higher pitched roofs, and thus the sunlight reaches these rooms for the maximum time in the morning and evening when the home is most used.'(99) A photograph in McDonald’s book Modern Housing illustrates how a pitched roof can block the sunlight from a house across the street (100). One year later the builders realised their mistake, and in the 1935 Ideal Home Exhibition there was only one house in the moderné style but several were shown with some elements derived from it (101). Modernism had been watered down as the English public were not prepared to make the big imaginative leap and were happy to be held back by nostalgia. In the 1935 Exhibition the curved look still remained and one house is shown with a flat roof, but it is hidden behind a parapet. The attempt to dictate style by architects and designers was defeated by the public who clearly did not wish to buy a house built in the moderné style
(96) The Builder (April 1934), p. 634.
(97) A. Jackson. Semi-Detached London (London, 1991), p.107.
(98) Ideal Home Catalogue (1934), p. 127.
(99) J. McDonald, Modern Housing (London, 1931), p. 79.
(100) ibid., p. 80.
(101) Ideal Homes Catalogue (1935), p. 32.