On a verdant Cambridge avenue known as ‘the Backs’ lies a perfectly proportioned early Victorian villa. Built in the 1840s, its rose-pink façade, with an Italianate-style pitched roof and bay windows, is but one of many aesthetic surprises. Once a spacious but conventional family home named The Yews, in the late 1920s its interiors were transformed into a rare and complete expression of British Modernism.
The unlikely mastermind behind this majestic metamorphosis was the quixotic English don Mansfield Forbes. When Forbes, known as ‘Manny’, took over the lease in 1928, its owners, Gonville and Caius College, gave him £1,100 to oversee a superficial modernisation of the run-down interior. Instead, guided by far grander ambitions, he commissioned the young Australian architect Raymond McGrath (who later worked on the interior at the BBC’s Broadcasting House) to realise his utopian vision for ‘an exhibition piece cum arts centre’ that would serve as a salon for all things shiny and new-fangled.
Dubbed Finella, the now Grade II-listed villa imaginatively evokes the tenth-century Scottish noblewoman of the same name, said to be descended from Pictish royalty, whose legend loosely links her with the discovery of glass. Its radical interior is adorned with the kinds of cutting-edge materials that were normally reserved for industrial use. Close to a century on, the effect remains dramatic. The atrium alone is a phantasmagoria of myth and mirror. Largely intact, the silver-leaf walls are coated in aquamarine transparent lacquer, with a mirrored vestibule and a false mansard ceiling rendered in reflective plate glass. The once brightly coloured rubber and gold mosaic floors (and the custom wall lights) are embellished with ancient motifs of serpents, shepherds and the namesake Pictish noblewoman herself.
Finella’s fabulously long hallway gave way to a stairwell with cast-glass pilasters and burnished copper balustrades, once theatrically illuminated and set off by a tented ceiling of billowing silk. By turns flamboyant and minimalist, Finella’s dining room was decked with little other than a circular mirrored table complete with elegant stools and a polished silver cocktail set. In lieu of Forbes’s rejected plans for a swimming pool, a blue-tiled fountain with a statue of a griffin was installed in the extensive gardens.
Finella found instant acclaim. The Studio observed its ‘mastery of light’ as an antidote to ‘Victorian dinginess’; Architect’s Journal called it ‘a symphony in glass’ – and in 1929, Vogue memorialised this ‘Modern house in Cambridge’. Just as Forbes had hoped, Finella became ‘a place to discuss new bold ideas’. Everyone from designer Charlotte Perriand to the artists Paul and John Nash visited. Rather than tours, Forbes hosted Sunday breakfasts and luncheons, and there are reports of indoor cricket being played with trays and ping-pong balls. Its reflecting walls are thought to have held the unofficial beginnings of the Twentieth Century Society, which still campaigns to protect modern architectural heritage. More recently, Finella was acknowledged by architectural historian Elizabeth Darling in the book Queer Spaces to have been a safe haven for homosexuality at the time.
Still owned by the college, today Finella is an office, an ad hoc events space and a home. For the composer and academic Robin Holloway, its longest-standing inhabitant, Finella reached its artistic apotheosis when Forbes arranged a wildly popular display of a controversial – and colossal – Seravezza marble sculpture by American/British sculptor Jacob Epstein. At 1.6m tall, Genesis captured a woman in the final throes of pregnancy. It took a troop of scrum-halfs to hoist her into the pink rooms where Holloway now resides. She promptly fell through the wooden floors into the basement. ‘Eccentric and inspiring – Manny saw it as a cause worth fighting for,’ says Holloway.
Once a sparsely furnished entertainment space, Holloway’s rectangular room is now dominated by a pair of grand pianos and an eclectic ensemble of books, vintage furniture, music sheets and rococo trinkets. It is divided at its centre by one of Finella’s more spectacular surviving features – a pair of folding lacquer-coated copper Plymax doors with wavy black nickel handles. ‘Art Deco was at a low point of its reputation when I moved here in the 1980s,’ says Holloway. ‘Now that’s been recognised as a mistake. It should be treasured as much as Elizabethan or Renaissance styles as part of the fabric of British architectural history.’
Though much has been lost to the ravages of time, decorative riches remain. ‘Finella is a special jewel hiding in plain sight,’ says Tom Broughton, the founder of Cubitts opticians, whose Cambridge store includes details drawn from his love of its interior. Broughton, who lives in the penthouse of the Isokon Building, a 1930s Modernist beacon in Belsize Park, observes the Finella effect in everything from his home’s copper-faced Plymax doors to its precisely replicated pink exterior (its architect, Wells Coates, and owner, Jack Pritchard, certainly visited). ‘Finella was so early and influential it deserves to be more widely known,’ he says. ‘I’d love to see it returned to its intended use – as a place where art and culture could draw people together under this theatrical milestone of modern design.’
To this end, in typically Forbesian fashion, Holloway continues to host hastily assembled music concerts in his rooms. More than 60 people can be comfortably accommodated on either side of the Plymax doors, with Holloway at the central pianos, to listen to sonatas. At these moments, filled with expectant art appreciators, he says, ‘Finella is still like a salon. It’s a place where music can bloom.’
To find out more about Finella, ring Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, on 01223 332400
