The Door to a Secret Room: A Portrait of Wells Coates

Forty years after his death, Wells Coates is seen as a seminal figure in the modern movement in architecture in Britain. His blocks of flats, his shop and office designs, houses, interiors, radios, and other industrial designs, are evidence of his commitment to a functional aesthetic and of his refusal to compromise his own high standards.Wells Coates’s daughter Laura Cohn has written this book to try to illustrate the conflicts, qualities and disappointments of an extraordinary man. The book is a portrait rather than a biography. It traces the beliefs that guided his working life, his ambitions, successes, and disappointments. The unhappy story of his marriage shows one part of his life experience; relationships with friends, colleagues and enemies reveal another side. The longest chapter, Lawn Road Flats, is of both personal and professional interest: it provides an absorbing account of how plans evolved for Coates’s first block of flats, and of the relationships between the architect and his clients. The story is of special interest in the light of the controversies surrounding the ownership of the flats by the London Borough of Camden and doubts and fears about the future of the building. About the Author Laura Cohn was an editor at Max Reinhardt and the Bodley Head, 1953-61, and at the Clarendon Press, 1965-69. She became a Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Oxford Polytechnic (now Brookes University) and taught there from 1970 to 1984.