Bernat Klein and High Sunderland: Displacement, Design and the Meanings of Home

Abstract

Abstract This article presents an up-to-date account of the life and work of the Yugoslavian textile designer and design consultant Bernat Klein (1922–2014). In the 1960s, he became internationally successful, because of his innovative use of colour in textiles for fashion and interiors. Based in part upon oral history interviews with Klein, the article helps us better understand him, not only as a foreigner in Mandatory Palestine and the UK, but also as a particular type of modernist. It pays focused attention to the house known as High Sunderland that was commissioned by Klein and his wife and designed by the British modernist architect Peter Womersley (1923–1993), including examining internal changes made as the Klein family lived in it. This essay engages and contrasts with the limited number of scholarly publications on this house, which have tended to take a singular view of it as an important example of British post-war domestic modernist architecture. It analyses the complex interconnections between High Sunderland as a modernist space reflecting Womersley and Klein’s shared aesthetic values, and as a family home that Klein was deeply attached to, emotionally and psychologically.