12-17 The Hamlet, and linking painted walls

Nos. 12-17 The Hamlet and linking painted walls

A line of six linked estate cottages commissioned in 1950 and built between 1960 and 1963 by the architectural practice Llewelyn Davies and Weeks. John Weeks was the job architect, with Michael Huckstepp as executive architect. The cottages were built for Lord Rothschild.

The buildings are constructed of white-painted brick on black-painted brick plinths, with slate roofs largely treated as monopitches and short stacks. They are single storey with storage lofts or playrooms.

The six cottages are arranged asymmetrically along a continuous brick wall. Nos. 12 and 13 form a pair set at right angles to the street; Nos. 14 and 15 form a mirrored L-shaped pair; and Nos. 16 and 17 are also L-shaped but linked only by the wall. All have large shed areas for storing tools and muddy boots.

The main houses are based on a rectangular plan 56 feet wide by 33 feet deep, with a central spine from which sections are cut away to create a picturesque yet coherent composition. All houses are arranged along the linking wall, which continues as the spine through them. All living rooms face south. The cottages have black timber doors, some front doors set in the angles of the L-shaped houses for greater protection and fitted with glazed panels, whilst shed doors are solid. Windows are timber, painted black, with opening lights painted white. Door-height vertical strip windows sit to the side of front doors to the larger units, and large closely-mullioned windows light the first-floor stores.

The interiors are not of special interest.

The black and white painted idiom is widely used in Suffolk and employs traditional materials, yet 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 whilst studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. The linking wall defines a sense of enclosure from which the orthogonal plans developed. The houses form a carefully organised group around a medieval well head, which is already listed. The plans are closely based on the award-winning prototype at Poplar Meadow, but represent the culmination of Weeks's ideas on enclosure with their more expressed porches.

The cottages at The Hamlet replaced a series of older cottages considered too dilapidated to repair. Although built to a higher specification than public housing, the development of a coherently planned house type and strong visual idiom was much admired at the time. Rushbrooke also broke the established imagery of post-war rural housing. Its ideas ran closely parallel to, but 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 or slightly later. These ideas, developed by Bill Howell and John Partridge, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson, and John Voelcker, were widely published and influential in some of these architects' later low-rise, high-density schemes for urban areas. They demonstrate how the pragmatic modernism of Rushbrooke was to become a powerful force in housing design in the later 1960s and 1970s.