The Spinney Including Car Port And Log Store

The Spinney is a two-storey detached house built in 1960, designed by architect Birkin Haward for himself and his family. The structural engineering was by F.J Samuely and Partners, and the building was constructed by George Kenney and Sons.

The ground floor comprises a grid of untreated reinforced concrete columns infilled with glazing and fair-faced Fletton brick panels. The bricks are arranged in an unusual pattern with headers on their sides set out in a grid. The first floor has a pine and cedar frame, clad externally with cedar boarding and large areas of glazing. The roof is covered in felt. A brick chimney rises from the building with a wooden boarded water tank attached. Throughout, the materials are deliberately simple and largely left in their natural state.

The house is planned around a central double-height hall which creates a sense of spaciousness and represents an individual interpretation of new domestic planning ideas. Entry is from the north through a glazed entrance hall, with a similar arrangement at the south end providing access via glazed doors to the rear garden. Subsidiary rooms flank the hall to east and west, with access to a covered terrace at the south-west corner. An open wooden staircase rises through the hall to the gallery above. The first floor oversails the ground floor and houses the main living spaces. The studio and living room form the north and south sides of the central open gallery, both with full-height windows overlooking the garden. The kitchen, dining room and bedrooms are accessed from the east and west sides of the gallery.

The principal north and south façades feature a recessed lower storey with the upper storey supported on concrete pilotis. These façades express a distinctive undulating roofline reminiscent of early post-war contemporary style, and are predominantly glazed with some louvred sections and insulated panels. The entrance on the north façade is flanked by plain glazing. The east and west façades are simpler with straight rooflines, the upper storey only slightly overhanging and punctuated by full-height windows. Two squares of the grid form a recessed terrace on the west side, now partially enclosed.

Inside the house, timber predominates and both the timber and concrete structure are revealed. First floor external walls are lined with plasterboard, and internal partitions are clad in pine. A brick fireplace wall separates the dining room and living room. At ground floor level, internal surfaces comprise brick panels and glazed screens. The undulating roofline is expressed internally, lined with wooden boarding in principal spaces and plasterboard elsewhere. The hall is spanned by a central timber beam and horizontal boarding, with a long curved perspex rooflight. Original suspended light fittings remain in the hall, supplemented by later fixtures, and a stove has been added. The ground floor has a tiled concrete floor; the first floor is softwood.

The house is set back from the road and partially screened by trees, reached via a covered walkway. A single-storey outbuilding range at the north-east corner comprises a car port and log store.

Birkin Haward (1912–2002) was an important architect and antiquarian who in the 1930s was at the forefront of the Modern Movement in Britain as chief assistant to Erich Mendelsohn. After the Mendelsohn and Chermayeff partnership dissolved in the late 1930s, Haward continued working in London. Following war service, he was offered a partnership in his native Ipswich with the firm Johns, Slater and Haward, which specialised in school buildings in the expanding Ipswich suburbs during the immediate post-war years. Schools formed the backbone of Haward's career in Ipswich and beyond, though he also designed office buildings and his Castle Hill Congregational Church in Ipswich was listed in 1998.

The Spinney is Haward's principal domestic work. He obtained the overgrown wooded site in 1957; it had been left vacant due to poor drainage. Design work began then, building started in January 1960, and the house was ready for occupation in August of the same year. Haward lived in the house until his death in 2002. After construction, he added glazed screens at the north and south ends of the hall to create small lobbies. In 1984, part of the covered terrace at the south-west corner was enclosed to create an additional room. In his 1996 Architectural Career and Autobiography, Haward wrote that The Spinney was "the only individual dwelling....that I felt able to conceive in an entirely uninhibited manner."