Raymond Unwin commissioned Guy Dawber to design the Suburb ‘show home’ at 6 Linnell Drive for the Hampstead Garden Suburb Development Company.

Overlooking the Great Wall and the Heath Extension, it was intended to be one of a pair of houses facing onto an open court across which views over open countryside could be enjoyed. It was the ideal of a town house in the country, and symbolic of the new form of development that the Garden Suburb would afford wealthy Londoners.
 

A fairly close contemporary of Edwin Lutyens, Dawber was highly regarded in his day being President of the Architectural Association (1904-1906), President of the RIBA (1925-1927), winner of the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (1928), one of two founders of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (1926) and a Royal Academician (1935). He was knighted in 1936, shortly before he died.
 

Dawber was born and trained in King’s Lynn. He moved to Dublin in 1881 before returning to London a year later owing to political troubles. After an apprenticeship in the office of Sir Ernest George, Dawber set up on his own in 1889, largely known for his country house work, particularly in the Cotswolds and the Home Counties.
 

His house at 6 Linnell Drive, built in 1908, reflects his country house practice. It is a Cotswolds manor house transplanted to London and built in brick. For a short period this house rose above the Great Wall in isolation before being joined by neighbours as plots were let. It set the tone for the architecture of this part of the Suburb.
 

In Hampstead Garden Suburb he also designed Nos. 38-48 Temple Fortune Lane, a crescent of houses set back from the road and arranged around a green. These modest houses illustrate that Dawber was capable of producing picturesque groups which illustrated the Unwin tradition of cooperative townscape. A painting of this group was used to illustrate a London Underground poster promoting the ‘healthy homes’ of Golders Green.