Erno Goldfinger was born in Hungary on 11 November 1902. He moved to Paris in 1921, where he studied architecture from 1923 to 1929. In the early-1930s he met and married Eleanor Blackwell and moved to London.
Hill Pasture was the first house Erno Goldfinger built in England following his arrival from Paris in November 1934. It is really his first house anywhere because the studio built at Cucq in 1933 scarcely qualifies as a house. Goldfinger's actual practice was limited to shops, exhibition stands, and apartment interiors. He had hoped for patronage from his wife's family when he came to England, but nothing was built, and most of his work came as a 'spin off' either of his own efforts in design for children, or from his Grafton Street Helena Rubenstein Salon, designed from Paris in 1927-8.
The Commission for Hill Pasture, a diminutive one bedroom studio bungalow in an extensive landscape garden, came to him though an assistant, Gerald Flower. In his own published pamphlet The sensation of Space, Goldfinger links the design of Hill Pasture forward to his exhibition pavilion for the This is Tomorrow show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956.