There has been a long tradition of crossover between cars and architecture. The birth of the motor car changed the look of houses forever as architects explored novel ways to incorporate the motor house into the fabric of the building. Entire new vernaculars sprung up overnight to cater for the new invention – multi-storey car parks, petrol stations – and, inevitably, many architects turned their hand to car design, few with successful results.
It seems appropriate, then, that The Automobile magazine have brought together a strikingly Modernist Rolls-Royce 20/25 and one of England's finest examples of Modernist architecture – The White House, in Surrey. One of Amyas Connell's early projects, it is a trailblazing, European-influenced riot of angles and glass that seems at odds with its genteel surroundings.
The car has a just as interesting interesting history as the house. Commissioned by a serial Voisin owner who tired of the French marque's poor reliability, he instructed local Dutch coachbuilder Schutter and van Bakel to fit the car with a Voisin-style body, and in the process created perhaps the most striking 20/25 ever built. The Voisin influence even extends to the running-board-mounted trunks with their fitted cardboard suitcases.
(Photographs by Nick Clements)