With Willow Road, Goldfinger staked his claim to serious attention. Financed by Ursula’s trust fund, with the aim of becoming self-financing through the sale or rent of the two ‘book-end’ houses, it was, compared to the startling bleached modernity of the nearby Isokon Flats or Maxwell Fry’s Sun House, a classic reinterpretation in brick and bold horizontal fenestration of the 18th or 19th-century London terrace. Despite his admiration for the Modernist housing exhibition outside Stuttgart, the Weissenhof, which he had visited in 1927, the realities of London and the development of his own mature style – which was far from being a blind pursuit of empty architectural rhetoric – led to a very different outcome.