Building study: Loader Monteith restores Peter Womersley’s High Sunderland
The Glasgow-based practice, working with a team of conservation specialists, has restored this 1957 Modernist house with meticulous detail
23 February 2021 By Alan Dunlop. Photography by Gillian Hayes
comment and share
In 1955, Bernat and Margaret Klein knocked on the door of a house ‘floating above the trees’ near their home in West Yorkshire and asked for the name of the architect. The house was Farnley Hey, designed by Peter Womersley for his brother, John.
Advertisement
Farnley Hey’s floor-to-ceiling windows, its split-level interior, and the ‘flow’ of its spaces so impressed the Kleins that a week later they invited Womersley to design their home and studio. Their site was on a densely wooded, isolated plot near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders. Bernat Klein was to become an internationally renowned textile designer and Margaret a talented knitwear designer. Both took inspira