ocean liner by the novelist Agatha Christie, who lived there for a time, so clean and striking was the design. The apartment building was the brainchild of Jack and Molly Pritchard, who in 1931 established a design firm featuring Modernist architecture and furniture. With simple living spaces strongly influenced by Coates' Japanese experience, and including built-in Isokon furniture, Isokon was "an experiment in collective housing designed for left-wing intellectuals". It became a haven for Germans and Hungarians escaping Nazi persecution and hosted many famous personages including Agatha Christie, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Isokon was ahead of its time: it won second place in Horizon Magazine's 'Ugliest Building Competition' in 1946, and would not be recognized as one of England's most important Modernist buildings for another decade. The building fell into disrepair by the 1990s but it changed ownership in 2001 and was fully restored by 2004. Later achievements An inventive genius, Coates revelled in introducing new ideas in his work. Among his innovations was the '3-2' architectural plan, where two living rooms on one side of the building are equivalent in height to three rooms on the other side, making two units vertically on three floors. He also designed the "D-handle", a simple door handle design commonly employed, for example, in Scandinavian furniture. In 1930 he designed a studio for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and among his technical designs was a microphone stand featuring an overhead counterbalanced arm that enabled the microphone to be moved to any part of the studio while remaining perfectly balanced. The design became a standard piece of equipment at the BBC. Coates also designed the distinctive and influential round bakelite cabinets used by EKCO for some of its radios during the 1930s. Featured in the V&A permanent collection, the Museum notes of the design of Model AD-65: "the severe geometric shape defined the visual vocabulary of radio design for many years". The thirties were his most prolific era. The Isokon was immediately followed by Embassy Court in Brighton (1935) and 10 Palace Gate, Kensington (1939). These were the only apartment buildings he would design. He also had several private home commissions. During World War II, he again served with the RAF, this time working on fighter aircraft development, for which he was later awarded an OBE. Following the war, he, like some other well known architects including Gropius and Breuer (by then