North London time capsule house: height of mid-century style on display in untouched Highgate home on sale for £1.2m

A house in Highgate that’s a fascinating Sixties time capsule, virtually unchanged in 60 years, is on the market for the first time.

It has been owned by the same family since it was built. Henry Hautman, an Austrian refugee who fled to the UK in 1935 and, along with many others, ended up in north London, bought the three-bedroom property to live in with his elderly mother.

In 1961, the mechanical engineer paid £9,500 for the house, a sum his friends thought him “mad to spend”. It is now on the market for £1.2 million.

A few years after he bought the property, Hautman met and married Areta Lea, an American psychiatric social worker who had been working at the airbase responsible for command and control of the US military’s strategic nuclear strike forces during the Cold War.

While the couple were on honeymoon in Mexico, Henry’s mother died and he and Areta, who had always dreamed of living in London, made the house a family home for them and their two children, born in 1970 and 1974.

Areta, who became a governor of King Alfred School in Highgate, installed an American-style, top-of-the-range Sixties kitchen boasting a waste disposal unit, a wall-mounted fold-out gas grill, built-in blender, a Swan oven and an American fridge, shipped over from the States.

Although the family considered moving to a bigger home, in the end they opted to spend their money on “holidays, travel and private education rather than get a larger mortgage” and stayed until Henry died in 2000, followed by Areta last year.

This means it has remained a time capsule offering a captivating glimpse of the “best that was on offer in the Sixties and early Seventies”, according to their daughter, Jennifer.

Retro furnishings included grasscloth wallpaper, parquet flooring, a G Plan kitchen, mid-century Danish furniture, an Eames chair and footstool and Rosewood dining furniture and sideboards, some of which are now in Jennifer’s flat.

Mark Sumray of Dexters in Highgate, marketing the property, said if the house had come on the market 20 years ago the new owners would almost certainly have completely remodelled it — but most of the prospective buyers of this house are mid-century architecture enthusiasts who plan to keep at least some of the original features intact.

“There’s a fashion for this sort of look, so people might well keep the wall cupboards and the wooden flooring. The kitchen is probably salvageable, too,” he said.

“We’ve had a lot of interest in the house because of the architecture. We even had two buyers who currently live in the Barbican bid – they want to upgrade and move closer to schools but they’re aficionados of the era.”