Felicia's Journey
NFTS Production design workshop

House Design Choice:

Art Moderne Style​

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The house Joseph Hilditch lives in is the same house he lived in as a child with his mother, so the house has been chosen by his mother.

 

I saw the mother as independent, ambitious and forward thinking. She showed affection to her son on screen but her attention turned to work as soon as the camera cut. For this reason I decided to choose Art moderne, or International Style as her chosen home. I read about all the design styles from Elizabethan to Victorian since these are the predominant domestic architecture styles in UK but no matter how much I tried I could not connect her with any of those styles, and Art Moderne encompassed her so well. 

 

I could not imagine her living in a Victorian house, something resembling a conservative British past, but the sterile and futuristic appearance of Art Moderne seemed more fitting, These were readily built in UK around the 1930s, a decade before Mrs Hilditch would have arrived in the UK, and would have still seemed like a new style, a pristine and clean restart after the Chaos of the war.

 

The story of how Art Moderne had to push through rejection and still proudly settled, whilst being so starkly different, along with it's "European" aesthetic made it all the more relevant to Mrs Hilditch.

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Art Moderne was an alien aesthetic to the British, especially after WW1, and was only partially accepted a decade later in UK through the sets seen in Hollywood films (even though it's origins were next door- in France and Germany). Art Moderne was generally seen as visually offensive and architects risked their careers by designing homes in the style. Some designs were never built and some houses were built with on option to have the British tiled pitched rood reinstated if it would attract dwellers, sacrificing it's customary and prominent flat roof.

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The Art Moderne houses were mainly built along the south coast of Britain, but a very small number were scattered around UK, including Yorkshire, Edinburgh, Ireland, and some were even built in Iceland (with thicker walls). Given the varied topography of Birmingham and its cover of woodland (also its history of ancient forests), a house of this style and size could theoretically exist in Birmingham without attracting attention.

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Hilditch worked as a caterer in a factory and lived a quiet British lifestyle - totally different from his mother's character, yet she was very dominant in his mind. The script states that the house is large (3 stories with 8 bedrooms) so I wanted to design a house where Hilditch lived comfortably, creating his own undisturbed world, but where he looked as lost and out of place as he did in his mind. Most importantly I wanted the viewers to feel the presence of his mother as much as Hilditch did.