3, Clarkson Road

House. Built in 1958 by architect Trevor Dannatt for historian Peter Laslett and his wife Janet. A Scandinavian-influenced modernist design that represents the most important and sole surviving unaltered example of Dannatt's houses in England.

The rectangular building features a ground floor of loadbearing Holco lightweight concrete blocks, painted green and black, with loadbearing cross walls. The upper floor is clad in vertical cedar boarding. A flat roof carries a single projecting stack. The building is distinguished by its projecting upper storey, containing the principal accommodation, expressed as a slightly raised box clad in timber. The design employs interesting sectional complexity through the use of half levels.

The entrance front presents a hardwood front door with two glazed panels and a letterbox in the transom to the side. To the right is a timber up-and-over garage door. The upper storey features a tall narrow window to the left and part of a low drawing room angled window to the right. The garden front displays a fold-back triple timber-framed window to the central ground-floor living room, with a copper band brought down from the roof interrupting the parapet line. Three further floor-to-ceiling windows to the right contain fixed lights below with a casement central section and top-hung hopper. A narrow window is positioned between the second and third windows.

The interior is organised around a central open staircase creating powerful diagonal views through the house between living room and kitchen. The hallway has a diagonally-set black tile floor and leads left into a former playroom with a stable door and red-painted plaster recess, right to a WC and built-in coat cupboard, and ahead into a dining room with grey flecked rubber tile floor extending into the kitchen. The kitchen features wall-to-wall mahogany counter with inset sink and two flush-fronted drawers below. The staircase has planked hardwood treads, raked risers and plank string, with a deep handrail supported on an iron bar and middle rail with pin connections to widely spaced iron balusters screwed to the string. Three concrete steps descend to boiler and storage space. The half-landing has a fully-glazed screen with glazed door to the living room, which features an unplastered white-painted brick cross-wall incorporating a fireplace and recess. Other walls are clad in horizontal cedar boarding extending across the landing. Four steps rise to a bedroom passage lit by a skylight. Bedrooms have flush doors with fanlights over, and one adjoining the bathroom features built-in wardrobe cupboards forming a low soffit by the doorway.

Dannatt was introduced to Laslett by fellow former student Rachel Rostas. The house shows affinities with Peter Moro's slightly earlier house for himself in Blackheath (Greenwich), as both place principal accommodation on the upper level expressed as a projecting box clad in richer materials. However, Dannatt's detailing is bolder, and the house is a pure rectangle whereas Moro's employs a split section with clerestorey. Here, extra height to the living room is achieved subtly by concealing a half level over the garage and exploiting a dip in the site. Dannatt had studied under Moro and subsequently worked with him and Leslie Martin on the Royal Festival Hall.