5 - The Isobar, Half-Hundred Club and the Arrival of Sonya

Summary

On 29 September 1937 the occupants of Lawn Road Flats received a letter from Jack Pritchard informing them of his decision ‘to form a club for the tenants of the flats and their friends’. He had ‘been fortunate’, he wrote, ‘in securing the services of T. A. Layton of the Book Wine Restaurant and Cheddar Roast to manage it.’ A prominent figure in the restaurant world and highly regarded in the wine trade for his ‘revolutionary practice of delivering carefully selected parcels of fine wine, from Bordeaux and Burgundy, to his customers throughout London,’ Tommy Layton brought reasonably-priced good wine to the tables of the middle classes. One of the most knowledgeable people in London when it came to cheese and wine he moved into Flat 7 in order to run the Isobar, the name chosen for the club room built into the basement of the Isokon building that same year.

The Isobar was designed by Marcel Breuer, the last of the Bauhaus trio then living in the Flats; Walter Gropius and Moholy-Nagy having left for America in the spring of 1937. Breuer furnished the Isobar's restaurant with some of his best known pieces of Isokon experimental furniture, including the dining chairs and tables, stools, nesting and occasional tables, and the short chair. Prototypes were illustrated in the avant garde publication Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art in 1937, where Beuer explained: ‘the plywood is not used merely as a panel or as a plane surface borne by separate structural members; it performs two functions at one and the same time – it bears weight and forms its own planes’.