Peter Duckworth interviews Miriam Howitt: the visionary behind the original Barbican interior designs.

In the late 1960s the architect Miriam Howitt was invited to design 5 show homes for the Barbican, ready for the1969 sales launch. Peter Duckworth caught up with Miriam at her home in South West London, now 95 years of age, to discuss her work at the Barbican back in 1968.

Miriam Howitt

Miriam in the 1960s from Miriam’s collection

Miriam today © Peter Duckworth

In 1967 Miriam Howitt received a call asking if she would be interested in designing the interiors for 5 show homes for the soon-to-be launched City of London Barbican Flats. Miriam trained at the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture in the early 1950s, a time when female architects were few and far between. She worked under Sir Hugh Casson, a very important figure in post-war British modernism, before setting up in practice with her husband, David. In the 1950s and 1960s architects often included interior design and product design in their remit as those latter professions were still very much in their infancy. Interestingly, Miriam is also renowned for designing one of the first open-plan rail carriages, a design which is still used to this day.

In the mid-60s she and her husband designed and built a true modernist house in southwest London. It is worth dwelling on that design for a few moments as it informs the principals which led to her extraordinary Barbican interiors.

From a 2024 perspective, her home looks like a perfect example of a Modernist house. Yet Miriam explains that at the time she was ‘just’ designing a practical house in which to bring up her family. The floor-to-ceiling windows on the upper floor were not designed for the sake of token-modernistic design, they were designed so that her children could see out without climbing on the furniture! Miriam had absorbed the modernist trends of the era, and without specifically trying to do so, she designed a home with such Modernist purity that it really deserves attention by the architectural community.

Le Corbusier was an influence on her, but not because of the style of building he designed, rather because he ‘illustrated that you could do what you felt was right for the Client and the situation’. The important point here, that makes Miriam seem so intuitively ahead of her time, is that she was not simply designing her home, nor the Barbican interiors, to be something stylistically important. Instead, she was designing her home for herself, and the Barbican interiors for potential residents; and designing freely in a style that she felt was fundamentally appropriate for the end-user and how they would want to live. It just so happens that her intuitive style is pure Modernism at its best: understated, restrained, and unintentionally effortlessly cool.

After working on the Barbican, Miriam went on to publish a book for the Design Council called “One-Room Living”, which contains practical advice for living in a studio or small apartment. She redesigned parts of Heathrow Terminal 1, designed extensions and renovations for numerous Churches, and counted John Cleese as amongst her clients. At the age of 95, Miriam is still working from her office within her home, and when I visited her she showed me fairly recent drawings and plans that she had been working on. She vividly remembers creating the Barbican show homes.

Miriam’s home she designed and built in 1965 © Peter Duckworth

Miriam Howitt’s home: open tread wooden staircase, white painted brick wall, hexagon hallway tiles © Peter Duckworth

Modernist chairs in Miriam’s living room © Peter Duckworth

The Barbican Show Homes

The Barbican show homes are extraordinary. Miriam was both ahead of her time, and yet still of her time and in fact she simply says: ‘yes, well, I was just a person of the time’. She describes how her style was influenced by trips to Scandanavia, and the interiors of Holland, which was far more progressive than the UK in terms of style choices. Looking on, in 2024, the show homes feel mostly very contemporary, but it is only now in the 21^st century that British interior design has finally caught up with Miriam’s style from the 1960s. When we look back at the history of interior design in the UK it is tempting to assume that everyone in the 60s was buying modernist classics such as Eames lounge chairs and egg chairs by Arne Jacobson, but this was simply not the case. Britain was still furnishing traditionally, all the way through to the mid-1990s when, with no small thanks to IKEA, we woke up to what had been going on in Europe for decades, and finally chucked out the chintz.

She describes the Barbican in the 1960s as ‘an interesting exercise, they were designing a community’. Miriam created imaginary residents for the show homes. She says, ‘I thought I had to imagine who would want these flats…I created a family, and then planned what I thought they would like to have, how they would like to live’.  She goes on: ‘I was designing for people, and hoped I understood their characters and that my designs would hit it off with the people who wanted to buy it’.

The imagined Barbican residents are wonderful: Flat 1 was ‘furnished for a young executive and his wife and the wife’s younger sister living with them’. Flat 2 ‘furnished for an intellectual couple who are interested in the arts. They have a grown-up daughter who stays with them when not on tour’. And Flat 3 ‘furnished for a merchant banker and his wife who frequently play host to their international friends and business colleagues’.  Attention to detail was very important, both in character and colouring, and Miriam says that even the book titles had to reflect the tastes of the imaginary clients.

To furnish and decorate the Barbican show flats Miriam was given a budget of just £200 for each flat. This meant a lot of work persuading furniture and fabric companies to lend their products for free, and most did this, hoping for future tenants to be inspired to replicate Miriam’s work. The books Miriam carefully selected for the show homes were often dust jackets she got from the publisher, covering cheap books se sourced second-hand!

Barbican owners refurbishing their flats over the past couple of decades often give their flats a retro-modernist look, and in doing so they unwittingly evoke many of the elements of Miriam’s show homes. Whilst the modernist elements of her design style will look familiar to many residents, the one area of her design which has not been so widely adopted, is her frequent use of strong pattern. She states that she would only use pattern in one element of a room, accompanied by plainer, complementary surfaces. Interestingly, perhaps with a certain backlash to minimalism in the interior design community, strong pattern and colour seems to have made an appearance in many modern interiors, though often as a total concept rather than just a highlighting element. So, perhaps we will see Miriam’s occasional use of strong pattern in Barbican homes more prevalent in future Interior Designers’ portfolios.

After she had finished her work at the Barbican she says ‘I just walked away’.  She has no idea what happened to them. ‘It was a fascinating job, a thoroughly enjoyable project to work on’.

Over the coming issues of Barbican Life we will look at each of the 5 show homes using comments directly from Miriam, and photos of the show homes from various sources. We have managed to source photos from nearly every room in all five show homes, many of which are Miriam’s own photos and have never been published before.

Show home number 1: Type 21 Speed House

Show home Number One was designed by Miriam Howitt in 1967. She based her design around an imaginary young executive and his wife, with the wife’s younger sister living with them, on a low budget spend. It appears that the flat was on the fifth floor of Speed House, probably on the west side. We have no pictures of Bedroom 1 but there is excellent detail on the rest of the flat.

Plan and Interior listing Leaflet

The drawing in fig 1 shows Miriam’s plan of the interior. The show home leaflet in fig 2 contains even more incredible detail. It itemises everything in the show home, down to such detail as the brand of fan heater, and even suggested cutlery items, along with addresses of suppliers. One item on the list of products of note: she has included a Phillps Infra-red lamp! This was a 60’s phenomenon, apparently a popular cure for all sorts of muscle and body issues.

Note the space for a washing machine in the kitchen plan: early residents were critical of the lack of a washing machine in the flats. The architects had assumed that the well-to-do residents would not lower themselves to do their own laundry, but would instead prefer to use a laundrette planned for the Barbican Estate. The problem was that a laundrette took a long time to materialise, which caused problems of practicality for many flat owners. Miriam was ahead of the curve and had planned a washing machine into her show home.

Figure 1 Miriam Howitt’s drawings of Show home 1 from the Barbican Archive

Figure 2 CoL leaflet re  Show Home 1 detailing from the Barbican Archive

The Lounge/Diner/Hallway

The centrepiece of the whole flat is the incredible Hugh Mackay carpet, in two shades of olive green and two shades of red. In the 21^st Century we often look back on the tight, bright swirls of 70’s carpets with disdain, but this 60’s piece is majestic with its simple bold pattern and two-tone colourways.

Figure 3 The majestic Hugh Mackay Carpet © Miriam Howitt

Miriam fell in love with the carpet herself, and decided to use it in the dining area of her own home. And 55 years later it is still going strong (see fig 4).

Figure 4 The same carpet in Miriam’s home, 55 years later © Peter Duckworth

The dining table echoes the green of the carpet whilst the red is picked out in the curtain fabric and accessories (fig 3).  In fig 5 on the left, you see the wonderful sideboard and cupboard configuration designed by Robert Heritage for Archie Shine, a much sought-after retro 60’s brand today.  This would look fabulous in a 2024 Barbican apartment incorporating as it does a wall cupboard, trolley, a mobile cupboard and the ubiquitous 60’s hot plate, plus a matching shelf unit in the hallway.

Figure 5 The Archie Shine sideboard on the left is a fabulous piece (Source: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections)

Figure 6 The Hallway © Miriam Howitt

Bedroom 2

The single bedroom is envisaged as the younger Sister’s bedroom.  Miriam explains that it is furnished in unmatched items which the Sister might have bought on impulse on payday.  Strewn on the bed is the first issue of the teenage Intro Magazine from October 1967. The carpet, which you can just see in the colour photo, is the lighter red of the lounge carpet, again reflected back in the curtains. In front, is a red Conran chest, and a David Bartlett iconic ‘Tab’ flat-pack cardboard chair, which was the first paper chair designed to support an adult’s weight. It sold for £2.25 in the 1960s and subsequently became a collector’s item. They now sell for considerable sums when they come up at auction.

Figure 7  Bedroom 2  © Historic England Archive. John Laing Photographic Collection

Figure 8 Bedroom 2

But the piece de resistance in this room is the wall behind the bed. Here we see Nigel Quiney’s 1967 ‘Scrolls 1’ wrapping paper in red, purple and burnt amber (see fig.9) used innovatively by Miriam as wallpaper.  In the mid-late 60s, Nigel Quiney became famous for his wrapping paper and other printed ephemera, and his designs epitomised swinging London of the 1960s. The V&A now hold 160 of his works, mostly wrapping paper. Miriam was really pushing the boundaries of interior design here, using this ‘right on’ wrapping paper as a wall covering, and creating what must have been a stunning feature wall, at a relatively low cost.

Figure 9 The Nigel Quiney wrapping paper Miriam used as a wall covering