Oliver Hill at Valewood farm and Daneway House: Designing a queer life in the British countryside

Within the scope of revisionist studies of architectural practices during the interwar period in Britain, and of the ways in which they have been understood, there remains a meaningful division between ‘Modernism’ and the ‘rest’, as architectural historian Neal Shasore has pointed out. [1] This putative division still results in explorations of Modernism through binary oppositions, producing restrictive understandings of the varied responses to modernity. It is within such a framework that the work of the architect Oliver Hill is presented as: a specialist in modern varieties of eighteenth-century wit, a playful, allusive, lover of silly jokes and sunbathing in the nude. This approach to life and design is then placed in contrast to the seriousness and moral high ground of Modernism.

These interpretations have promoted an understanding of architectural Modernism that is blinkered toward its avant-garde protagonists, and they have failed to reflect upon Modernism's exclusions; those aspects to which it was inextricably linked, such as gender, fashion, taste and commerce. What happens, then, if we confront these boundaries not as rigid but as fluid? Taking the work of John Potvin on Queer Bachelors and his understanding of queer as a starting point, this paper seeks to question how an analysis of what is at ‘odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’[2] can bring more to our understanding of practitioners like Hill, and more broadly to the practice of interior decorating during the interwar period.

Looking more closely at aspects such as surface, collecting and fashionability in Hill’s own domestic settings, this paper seeks to question what these spaces can bring to our understanding of architectural professionals, such as Hill, who fashioned their own domestic environments on their own terms ‘apart from the stifling strictures of hetero-patriarchy that surrounded them’.[3]

[1] N. Shasore, Architecture and the Public in Interwar Britain, PhD Thesis, St John’s College, Oxford University,

2016, p.20.

[2] J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in

Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018, p.27.

[3] J. Potvin, Op.Cit., p. 286.