The desk, designed by Hungarian born architect and designer Marcel Breuer has an interesting history from its patronage to its design and beyond. The desk was commissioned by Dorothea Ventris, a committed collector of contemporary art and design, for her home in Highpoint I, a block of flats in Hampstead, London. Highpoint was itself a modernist building designed by the Russian-born architect Bertold Lubetkin. The desk remianed in the flat until the 1950s when her son, Michael Ventris, designed a new home for himself, incorporating the suite of furniture commissioned by his mother. This new house was built at 19, North End, again in Hampstead. An extraordinary twist to the story of the desk, comes with its later role. It is thought that it was at this desk that Michael Ventris was working when he first deciphered Minoan Linea B script, an ancient language that had puzzled archaeologists for many years. Although he was an architect by profession, Ventris was a keen amateur linguist and his work allowed many important inscriptions from the ancient world to be deciphered.