Our bodies leave traces in the spaces we inhabit: dust made of fragments of our bodies that detach, fall, and settle onto architecture, signalling human presence. As Mary Douglas noted, we clean and discard those traces to restore order.¹ But who performs this morally charged labour, and do their own traces vanish along with the dust? Housework unfolds in an intimate relationship with the materiality of the house; however the bodies performing these tasks have been invisibilized both through the canon of architectural history and within modern domestic architecture itself.

The house at 2 Willow Road in Hampstead, London (1938–39), offers a revealing case study. Designed by architect Ernö Goldfinger as his family home, it was first inhabited by himself, his wife, the artist Ursula Goldfinger, their two children, Peter and Elizabeth, and three domestic workers: Rosie Hayden, the cook; Betty Boothroyd, the nanny; and the chauffeur whose name remains unknown. However, most accounts of the house have overlooked the role of domestic service in its architectural history. A white door in the corner of the hall that once led to the servants’ quarters — later converted into a separate living unit — now stands permanently closed. This thesis aims to reopen that door to critically examine how housework was embodied in modern domestic architecture, and how space materializes and negotiates social structures of domestic life.

2 Willow Road negotiated ideas around gender, class, and service in complex and often contradictory ways. It contributed to the invisibilization of housework, both in its initial design and in its subsequent use and adaptations. Although it has often been celebrated as a modernist house, the ideas around domesticity that informed its design and inhabitation aligned more closely with nineteenth-century traditions. In this sense, the house was transitional, embodying modernist ideals while simultaneously reproducing long-standing social and gender hierarchies. ‘Progressive’ architectural features such as folding partitions, coved skirtings, or easy-to-wipe surfaces did not fundamentally challenge class or gender norms, but some of them ended up highlighting inequalities.

These tensions ran throughout the house. The first kitchen, hidden away, was located in the servants’ quarters so that smells and noises would ‘stay in their place,’ reflecting a traditional view of domestic labour as something to be concealed; yet it was large and functional. Furthermore, the compact layout of the house and Goldfinger’s dislike of corridors hindered the separation of bodies, thereby creating spaces of collision. However, a dumbwaiter was introduced to mediate this tension, encapsulating the paradox of simultaneously erasing the workers’ presence and easing their physical burden, thus functioning as a mechanism for invisibilization. This dialectic of exposure and concealment extended to other areas of the house, most notably the ground-floor cloakroom (toilet), one of the most provocative spaces. Its translucent glass and stark exposure make it sensual and playful, simultaneously obscuring and revealing, unlike Le Corbusier’s or Adolf Loos’ sinks designed to ‘clean the gaze.’²

The post-war transition to a ‘servantless’ domesticity shifted responsibilities to Ursula Goldfinger. Yet the family still relied on hired domestic help. A daily woman carried out the roughest household tasks. ‘Servantless’, then, meant a reconfiguration of service, not its disappearance. This transition did little to challenge gender roles: housework remained strongly feminized, and middle-class women like Ursula were expected to take responsibility for it. This required a reframing of domestic labour as an act of love, care, and emotional reward, while also being couched in scientific discourses of hygiene and efficiency. This dual framing sought to preserve social status, but ultimately deepened existing contradictions. Love and duty were tangled with labour and science, placing women in a conundrum of conflicting expectations. At 2 Willow Road, this meant Ursula’s responsibilities tied her to the ‘invisible’ realm of the ground-floor kitchen and the nursery, while the daily woman’s presence was rendered even more invisible, as Goldfinger’s correspondence with his father reveals an overlooking of her labour.

The disjunction between the house’s representation in architectural media — marked by austere, carefully staged interiors — and its lived reality — cluttered with objects, rugs, plants, art, and trinkets — reveals that, although hygiene remained an aesthetic value, it was more rhetorical than practiced, and the house was not shaped by modernist hygiene anxieties. Nonetheless, the kitchens designed in 1960–61 retained a stronger connection to those ideals of hygiene and efficiency. The exhibition ‘Planning Your Kitchen’ (1944), developed by Ernö Goldfinger in collaboration with Ursula Goldfinger, seemed to have informed their design. Yet the results were ambivalent. The basement kitchen was more open and integrated with the dining room. In contrast, the first-floor kitchen — the one used by Ursula — was cramped, poorly ventilated and illuminated. Although efficient in its organization, it confined her labour to an isolated, relegated space. Meanwhile, Goldfinger gained Ursula’s studio, symbolically reinforcing a hierarchy of bodies and activities: the architect’s professional work was prioritized over the housework that sustained it.

This imbalance spatialized gendered hierarchies. The first-floor kitchen was hidden and small, barely accommodating more than one person, while Goldfinger’s studio was untouched and even took over Ursula Goldfinger’s studio, which was regarded as the heart of the house. Architecture itself thus mediated inequality — not only rendering housework invisible, but also relegating the female body to invisibility. In this light, works like Ursula Mayer’s film Interiors (2006), which stages female presences within the house, are essential in reintroducing the gendered dimensions effaced in its representation.

This dissertation argues for the critical potential of reframing such sites through the lens of housework, gender, and class. Doing so not only makes visible the often-erased contributions of women like Ursula Goldfinger, servants, and domestic workers, but also challenges the ways architectural history has naturalized their invisibility within modernism. More broadly, it opens a pathway for curating modernist homes with greater attention to housework, highlighting how these spaces were lived, negotiated, and shaped by dynamics of class and gender. Such a perspective not only enriches the narrative of 2 Willow Road but also reframes Ernö and Ursula Goldfinger within the broader discourse of domestic modernity in Britain.