The Ahm House at 44 West Common Way is a house in

Harpenden Harpenden () is a town and civil parish in the City and District of St Albans in the county of Hertfordshire, England. The population of the built-up area was 30,240 in the 2011 census, whilst the population of the civil parish was 29,448. Har ...

Hertfordshire Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...

, England. It was built between 1961 and 1963 by the structural engineer

Povl Ahm Povl Ahm CBE FICE FREng (26 September 1926 – 15 May 2005) was a structural engineer and former chairman of Ove Arup & Partners. Life Born in Aarhus, Denmark, Ahm attended the Polyteknisk Læreanstalt in Copenhagen, from where he graduated in ...

, a partner of Ove Arup, for himself to a design by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon. Ahm, Arup and Utzon were working on the design and construction of

Sydney Opera House The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre in Sydney. Located on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour, it is widely regarded as one of the world's most famous and distinctive buildings and a masterpiece of 20th-century architec ...

at the time of the house's construction. The house has been listed Grade II on the National Heritage List for England since July 1998. In their official listed building report Historic England described the house as "a distinguished and beautifully detailed modern house, in the idiom of an important architect who built relatively little".

Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (1 ...

in the Hertfordshire edition of his '' Buildings of England'' series described the Ahm House as an "interesting modern house ... hatmakes no concessions to the outsider nor to the genteel facadism of its neighbours. All that one sees from the road is a yawning carport with a rhythm of projecting concrete beam-ends above, and a tall blank yellow brick wall on the right".

References

{{coord, 51.7983, -0.3605, type:landmark_region:GB, display=title Grade II listed houses in Hertfordshire Harpenden Houses completed in 1963 Jørn Utzon buildings Modernist architecture in England