Brooklyn at 8 Private Road, Enfield, is a detached house built between 1883 and 1887 by the architect

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (12 December 1851 – 15 March 1942) was a progressive English architect and designer, who influenced the Arts and Crafts Movement, notably through the Century Guild of Artists, which he set up in partnership wit ...

. It has been listed Grade II on the National Heritage List for England since February 1970. The house was designed by Mackmurdo for his brother in 1883. He also designed Halcyon (No. 6) in 1874 in a half-timbered style for his mother, but that house was demolished in 1968. Brooklyn's flat roof and regular shape were considered very daring and innovative when it was built and caused considerable comment.Carter, Valerie (Ed.) (2000) ''Treasures of Enfield: Discovering the Buildings of a London Borough''. Enfield: Enfield Preservation Society. p. 125. The style of the house foreshadows many architectural trends that would become prominent in Modernism and Art Deco several decades later. Finn Jensen in his book ''Modernist Semis and Terraces in England'', describes Brooklyn as "essentially in a Classical style but unlike any other private dwellings of the period".

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 ...

highlighted the house's flat roof and horizontal windows in his 1960 book, ''Pioneers of Modern Design''. Pevsner describes Brooklyn as the "only European parallel" to the White House,

E. W. Godwin Edward William Godwin (26 May 1833, Bristol – 6 October 1886, London) was a progressive English architect-designer, who began his career working in the strongly polychromatic " Ruskinian Gothic" style of mid-Victorian Britain, inspired by ...

's 1878 house for

James McNeill Whistler James Abbott McNeill Whistler (; July 10, 1834July 17, 1903) was an American painter active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He eschewed sentimentality and moral allusion in painting and was a leading pr ...

Tite Street Tite Street is a street in Chelsea, London, England, within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, just north of the River Thames. It was laid out from 1877 by the Metropolitan Board of Works, giving access to the Chelsea Embankment. Hist ...

, Chelsea. The Twentieth Century Society has described Brooklyn as "proto-Modern".

References

{{coords, 51.6456, -0.0792, display=title Enfield, London Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo buildings Grade II listed buildings in the London Borough of Enfield Grade II listed houses in London Houses completed in 1887 Houses in the London Borough of Enfield