Ernst Ludwig Freud 1892 - 1970

Freud’s background

Ernst Ludwig Freud was born in Vienna in 1892, the youngest of the three sons of Sigmund Freud and by 1920 was a successful architect working in the Art Deco style, whose clients were mainly doctors. By 1930 he was more influenced by Mies van de Rohe and by 1933 the Nazi takeover  forced him to leave for London where he was joined in 1938 by his parents and sister Anna.  (Their Hampstead home is now the Freud Museum).

Architecture in England

Married to Lucie Brasch, he had three sons, Stephen, Clement ( writer, broadcaster, M.P. and celebrity chef) and Lucian (artist) and ran his architect’s practise from their St John’s Wood Home.  He designed Frognal Close in 1939 and Belvedere Court in Lyttleton Rd, Hampstead, and the Sigmund Freud memorial at Golders Green cemetery.  He worked on various houses on the Eyre estate and in 1951 he built the Mermaid Theatre in Acacia Road for Bernard Miles. This had started off as an old school hall but was transformed into an auditorium seating 200 with marble painted columns, tapestries and white clouds painted on the ceiling and is famous for the performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas which took place there. In 1958 he designed the synagogue at the London Jewish Hospital, but as a staunch atheist he refused to attend his son Clement’s wedding in a church in 1950.