"Even for the enthusiast," said Nikolaus Pevsner in his Buildings of England guidebook, "Atour of Becontree is demanding." In the 1960s, the attractions of the world's biggest interwar council estate, which is celebrating its centennial this year, were not immediately evident to the German-born architectural historian.

They probably aren't to many people nowadays. Becontree, which spans four square miles in east London's Barking and Dagenham, lacks both the architectural drama of places like Thamesmead and the charming bucolic appeal of a garden city.

Instead, it's a stereotypical image of unremarkable suburbia. Along avenues and crescents, rows upon rows of brick terraced homes, each with its own front and back yard, are organized, with the odd parade of businesses. So far, so ordinary.

But one thing Pevsner didn't have on his trip was Verity-Jane Keefe at his side. The estate becomes a colorful patchwork of unique creative actions when seen through the eyes of one artist, who has been working in and around the estate for the past 15 years. Homes with mock-Tudor paint treatments, facades reinforced with rustic crazy pavement, and porches jollied up with porthole windows may be found.

A sculpted plaster relief of a squirrel emerging from a decorative roundel competes for prominence with pastel-painted pebbledash and whirling roughcast render.

When you round the corner, you'll see front doors with Corinthian columns and hanging plastic topiary balls, as well as gates guarded by a pair of golden cement lions. The rustic treehouse style of Sylvanian Families may be seen throughout the crescent, which was constructed from wood by Swedish craftsmen in the 1920s.

Another neighborhood has streamlined art deco sun-trap windows that seem like they belong in a Poirot novel. Becontree shows itself to be a delightfully rich collection of odd household features the closer you investigate.

It's an open-air museum depicting the effect of various housing policies, the varied preferences of municipal maintenance departments, and generations of right-to-buy purchasers, all fashioned in plaster and paint.

As we walk the streets, marveling at the variety of door kinds, porch forms, and other creative add-ons, Keefe comments, "Some people think it's a real mess when they finally come here." "In bird's-eye views, Becontree is usually shown as this beautiful picture of identical 'homes for heroes' with tidy privet hedges.

The reality, on the other hand, is a place made up of thousands of individual decisions and adjustments through time."

Becontree was the most ambitious public housing project of its period, built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1935. It turned a 3,000-acre stretch of Essex market gardens into a model cottage-garden estate with 26,000 houses for 100,000 people, many of whom were rehoused from East End slums and now had access to running water and indoor toilets for the first time.

One of the earliest inhabitants characterized it as "heaven with the gates open."

It has suffered from poor upkeep and had many houses auctioned off via right-to-buy in the decades afterwards, as have many other council estates of the time. It was recently named one of the most profitable locations for landlords to invest in the nation, with the second highest buy-to-let yield.

So, how do you commemorate the 100th anniversary of a location like this, which is still evolving and distant from its initial vision? The official centenary programme, organized by the borough of Barking & Dagenham in collaboration with arts organisation Create, includes a number of initiatives, including a pair of colorful new playgrounds designed by Yinka Ilori and Eva Rothschild, as well as new public squares on the estate's corner plots designed by nimtim architects and set to open next year.

But it is Keefe's year-long residence, Living Together, that gets the most beneath the skin of the area. Working with inhabitants, he investigated the effects of de-industrialisation, immigration, workers' rights, and the right to purchase on the estate.

Keefe refers to her approach as "lurking" half-jokingly. It's a kind of meticulous close-looking that exposes hidden depths from details, coupled with door-knocking and a laid-back demeanor that leads to being welcomed in for cups of tea and discussions on porcelain owls.

The consequences are seldom apparent or evident right away. A series of communal banjo-band concerts in the estate's pedestrian cul-de-sacs – known as "banjos" for their round-ended shape – has been one of the most bizarre results of the residency, among reading clubs and virtual walks.

Keefe's year of observation and recording has resulted in the show Lived in Architecture, in which she has brought the ad-hoc beauty of Becontree to the majestic surroundings of the Royal Institute of British Architects at Portland Place in London. It's possible that this is the first time the Riba has seen crazy pavement, pebbledash, and cement lions honored in its sacred halls, and it's a wonderfully bizarre sight to see.

Visitors enter via a false brick archway with a vaguely mock-Tudor pattern into a display designed as a succession of stage-set fronts, with a variety of entrances and features taken from throughout Becontree. One recreates the estate's signature shared porch, in which two homes' front doors are framed by a single arched opening – except one neighbor decided they didn't want to share, so they bricked up their half of the entrance and built a new front door to one side, flanked by classical pilasters and topped with an uPVC pediment.

The replica frontages connect to small chambers where Riba archival drawings have been chosen to expand on themes of adaptation, expansion, and customization from the past 200 years of architectural history. Some of the links are a little shaky, but the goal is to lend historical weight to what would otherwise be regarded as suburban kitsch, demonstrating that the house renovations found in Becontree have a long and distinguished history.

"Pebbledash has a lot of stigma attached to it," adds Keefe. "Many people believe it was all added after the right to buy in the 1980s, but it was actually part of the original estate plans."

The exhibition includes photos of a modernist house in Chelsea by Bauhaus maestro Walter Gropius that was later pebbledashed by Theo Crosby in the 1970s, as well as Charles Rennie Mackintosh's use of roughcast render ("the OG pebbledash," as Keefe puts it), and photos of a modernist house in Chelsea by Bauhaus maestro Walter Gropius that was later pebbledashed by Theo Crosby in the 1970s.

Other drawings include plans for large classical porches to be bolted on the fronts of Georgian houses, as well as stunning pictures by the underappreciated Victorian architect George Devey, a master of fictitious historical collage. In intricately layered imaginations, his wonderfully delicious rural homes were designed to appear as if they had been built over centuries, blending mock-Tudor walls with Flemish gables and medieval battlements.

The show's centerpiece is a 15-minute video called Wild Fantasies Are Always Worth Considering, which combines Keefe's lyrical views of Becontree with the voices of inhabitants describing their houses' oddities. It features video of two expert plasterers at work, recreating the iconic squirrel for the show, where it now proudly stands on the wall among pictures of the Villa Medici in Rome and Henry VIII's Nonsuch Palace.

In the 1500s, Henry VIII was so enamored of the Medici stucco work that he had Italian craftsmen replicate it tenfold over the façade of his magnificent castle in Surrey (since demolished). The method, known in England as pargeting, was imitated by a slew of aspiring homeowners in the south-east, and it was revived in Essex in the 1980s. What about the squirrel's origins?

"When I asked the guy to render the front of the house," a Becontree resident recalls, "he said he could do something as a focal point." It was there when I returned home.

I never requested a squirrel. We're stuck with it, therefore we've got to like it. We have no option but to enjoy it."

Thanks to Oliver Wainwright at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.