Francis Machin: Architect who left a body of stylish designs: obituary by The Times/ Times Online

architect/artist: Francis Machin
obituary title: Francis Machin: Architect who left a body of stylish designs, including gazebos, conservatories, lively conversions and new homes
obituary compilation no: T-07
format: Text
date: April 27, 2007
appeared in: The Times/Times Online
writer:

photo by:

courtesy: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1711736.ece

Obituary Details:



Architect, sculptor and painter, Francis Machin also drew with an Ardizzone touch. He sketched out bird’s-eye views of buildings and gardens as he talked at dazzling speed. His artistic eye showed too in his many photographs, stemming equally from acute powers of observation whether he was collecting old tools and fossils, or berries and field mushrooms to sustain his lifelong vegetarianism.

With this went a keen interest in things mechanical. As an architectural student he designed and built his own dune buggy with an aeroplane roof on a VW Beetle chassis and he was still driving it to France 30 years later. More recently he had restored a long-rusted Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

Francis Machin was born in 1949. His father, Arnold Machin, RA, was best known for his classic heads of the Queen on postage stamps and coins. Arnold had grown up in acute poverty in Stoke-on-Trent, but his talents had been spotted by Wedgwoods which gave him a studio and the freedom to work as he wished. Francis’s mother, Patricia (née Newton), was a talented painter, particularly of gardens and flowers. As an only child in a closeknit family, Machin absorbed both his father’s and his mother’s skills. His lifelike terracotta busts of his friends were almost indistinguishable from his father’s, while his deftness in colouring his drawings and sketching in watercolour stemmed from his mother.

Machin studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture (1968-73) in London, where he was taught by Sir Terry Farrell, who considered him one of his most talented pupils.

His first job was in the office of the commercial architect, Colonel Richard Seifert. There he and a fellow student, Malcolm Elliot, designed an office building – which stands beside Covent Garden Tube station – before they had even qualified.

Arnold Machin was an imaginative designer of gardens and grottoes, and father and son worked together, first at the remarkable garden that Arnold created at Offley Rock, Stafford, and when this was sold, at Garmelow, a farmhouse in Staffordshire with a lovely group of barns which, in the past few years, Machin was establishing as a foundation for young artists in memory of his father.

This interest in garden buildings led him to his best-known venture, Machin Conservatories. His were built of aluminium with a distinctive ogee (flame-headed) silhouette and were soon to be seen attached to smart houses and hotels in London and the country.

Establishing a factory near Stone he won the Queen’s Award for Industry in 1989. The largest of his conservatories was designed for the first International Garden Festival at Liverpool in 1984.

Another popular design was for a gazebo with tapering roof. This led, in turn, to the commission for the blue Mercury telephone kiosks.

For the actor Michael Caine he adapted a house near Henley with a double-height indoor pool extending into a conservatory and overlooked by a gallery leading to the cinema and billiard table. He designed a pool house for Sebastian de Ferranti in Cheshire and another for Basil de Ferranti in Hampshire, whose house he extended. He also transformed two houses in Campden Hill for Princess Ezra Jah.

From his late twenties Machin showed a passionate interest in preserving and adapting old buildings, often in innovative ways. He joined with gusto in the campaign to save Mentmore Towers, drawing posters and postcards for the SAVE Britain’s Heritage campaign. For SAVE he drew an inspired series of schemes – published as Bright Futures – showing how derelict industrial buildings could be reused and the blighted landscapes around them transformed by imaginative planting.

Most recently his lively drawings of South Kensington Tube station, as it is and as it could be, helped to avert demolition and secure the station’s listing.

His biggest scheme of this kind was the first of the Battersea riverside conversions at Ransome’s Dock – a group of warehouses built for the ice-cream manufacturer Carlo Gatti. Working with the entrepreneur Paul Cooke, Machin created a lively complex of shops, restaurant and offices. He also designed two stylish, split-level penthouses, one for himself, as well as building a rooftop conservatory. This led in turn to a penthouse (with swimming pool) on the roof of Abbot’s House in Kensington and one of the first warehouse conversions in Smithfield, Denmark House, with a shop below and flats above.

One quality of Machin’s architecture was his bold use of natural materials, particularly wood and stone. He used these in adventurous ways, notably in broad spiral staircases with jazzy balustrades.

In Devon he ingeniously doubled in size an ancient cob farmhouse for his family, disguising the additions as a barn enlivened with Gothic doors and windows. More recently he had converted the grand Baroque almshouses at Preston-on-the-Weald Moors in Shropshire as flats, designing attractive homes in the local vernacular with dogtooth cornices and diamond-pattern brickwork.

Machin was a keen traveller. In Burgundy he bought a derelict, late-medieval gentilhommière, Le Changy, with a large courtyard of ancient farm buildings that he gradually repaired. In Italy he restored a group of farm buildings between Florence and Siena. He was near completing the conversion of another group of farm buildings near Lucca. He also went to India to suggest ways of reviving the 19th-century Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad.

His great parties included showing films at his father’s Chelsea studio which he would always light with dozens of candles for the occasion. He organised brilliant firework displays for friends in Shropshire. Another perennial enthusiasm was for designing board games, some of which he put into production himself.

Machin took extraordinary interest in developing the talents of his three children, teaching them to draw and making models with them – a Greek amphitheatre, an orrery, a working waterwheel, windmills and medieval catapults, and an unfinished, remote-controlled scale model of the Titanic.

Despite diabetes and a weak heart he remained a workaholic with a punishing schedule, often driving his children from Devon to Shropshire and France. Most recently he had designed a series of eight spacious and handsome colonnaded houses at Brondesbury Park, in Brent, with basement pools and conservatories. His latest completed work is a strikingly beautiful gallery of his father’s work at Garmelow linked to a conservatory and columned and cupolated fernery.

Machin is survived by his first wife, Anne, and his second wife, Victoria, and by his three children.

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Francis Machin, architect, was born on November 29, 1949. He died of a heart attack on April 15, 2007, aged 57

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