23-41, THE RYDE

A row of patio houses built between 1963 and 1966, designed by David Randall and Peter Parkes of Peter Phippen and Associates for Michael Baily and the Cockaigne Housing Group. The houses are constructed with black-stained weatherboarding, featuring vertically boarded walls and deep, horizontally boarded fascias. They are timber-framed with Douglas fir glazed screens and windows, and have fair-faced dense concrete block crosswalks. Flat roofs complete the exterior. These are staggered, single-storey houses with narrow frontages, ranging from one to four bedrooms, and include internal patios. This scheme, along with numbers 43-79 (odd), represents a pioneering example of single-storey patio houses and was the first in a series of notable projects by the practice. The design was inspired by Danish examples and by research at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government Research and Development Group, where Randall and Parkes were previously employed. The Ryde introduced a two-bay plan allowing for various configurations providing a range of bedroom numbers and internal patios to maximize light and ventilation. The development was built for the Cockaigne Housing Group, established by Michael Baily, on land allocated by Hatfield Development Corporation, and received an Architectural Design Project Award in 1964.