Number 4 And Adjoining Painted Walls

Estate cottage commissioned in 1950 and built between 1956 and 1959 by the architectural practice Llewelyn Davies and Weeks, with John Weeks as job architect and Michael Huckstepp as executive architect, for Lord Rothschild.

The building is constructed of white-painted brick on a black-painted brick plinth, with a slate roof largely treated as a series of monopitches and short stacks. It is single-storey with a storage loft or playroom, and incorporates a large ground-floor shed with a separate entrance for storing tools and muddy boots. The house plan is based on a rectangle 56 feet wide by 33 feet deep, with a central spine from which sections are cut away to provide a picturesque but coherent composition with Nos. 1-3, from which it is separated only by a gap in the linking wall which runs through the entire composition and continues as the spine through the house.

The building features black timber doors, the front door with glazed panels and the shed door solid. Timber windows are painted black with opening lights painted white. There is a door-height vertical strip window to the side of the front door and a large closely-mullioned window to the first-floor store. The interior is not of special interest.

Although the black and white painted idiom is widely used in Suffolk and the materials are traditional, Rushbrooke is wholly modern in its planning and design. Richard Llewelyn Davies and John Weeks were commissioned in 1950 to build estate cottages for Lord Rothschild, whom Llewelyn Davies had met while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1930s. The linking wall defined a sense of enclosure from which the orthogonal plans developed. The cottages at The Hamlet followed from an award-winning pair of cottages built at Poplar Meadow as a prototype, and they replaced a group of old cottages which were demolished as being beyond repair.

Though built to a higher specification than public housing, the development of a coherently planned home type and strong visual idiom was much admired at the time. Rushbrooke broke the established imagery of post-war rural housing. Its ideas ran closely parallel to, and indeed slightly anticipated, the research of the English group of CIAM (the international research group on modern architecture with a particular interest in housing and planning) in 1955, whose ideas were developed by Bill Howell and John Partridge, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson, and John Voelcker. These concepts were widely published and were influential in some of these architects' later low-rise high-density schemes for urban areas. They demonstrate how the pragmatic modernism of Rushbrooke became a powerful force in housing design in the later 1960s and 1970s.