Initially interested in engineering (the family business was forestry and saw-mills), he began to consider architecture after coming across Hermann Muthesius’s Das Englische Haus (1904-05): English domestic architecture as observed by the German cultural attaché in London from 1896 onwards. In Muthesius’s pages, Arts and Crafts emerges as a style in which modernity and tradition, contemporary needs and vernacular skills sit effortlessly together. Goldfinger never forgot Muthesius’s insights, and fifty years later was still recommending the book.