Numbers 1, 2 And 3 And Clubhouse, And Linking Painted Walls

Group of three linked estate cottages and clubhouse at the Hamlet in Rushbrooke. 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 buildings are constructed of white-painted brick on black-painted brick plinths with slate roofs largely treated as monopitches and short stacks to the houses.

The three cottages are single storey with storage lofts. Numbers 2 and 3 are treated as a mirrored pair of L-shaped two-bedroom cottages, linked by a wall to Number 1, which is also L-shaped, and thence to the clubhouse set back on the principal road through the village. All buildings have large shed areas for storing tools and muddy boots. The house designs are 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. All houses are arranged along the linking wall, which continues as the spine through them, with all living rooms facing south. Black timber doors are used throughout; some front doors are set in the angle of the houses to give greater shelter and have glazed panels, whilst those to the sheds are solid. Timber windows are painted black with opening lights painted white. Large closely-mullioned windows light the first floor stores. The interiors are not of special interest.

The clubhouse repeats the same design idiom on a larger scale. The bar is in two sections, the rear part separated by a sliding partition originally used for dances, and the club room is set either side of the central entrance. Black timber doors and windows with white-painted opening lights are used throughout. The glazing to the main hall at the side of the entrance is in a pattern inspired by Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp and is set with red glass. The main bar area opens to the high monopitched roof with bar and fireplace. The clubhouse was inspired by a television presented by Lord Rothschild at a time when such items were luxuries not found in most rural homes.

The black and white painted idiom is widely used in Suffolk and the materials are traditional, 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 when studying at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1930s. The linking wall defined a sense of enclosure from which the orthogonal plans developed. The group of linked cottages forms a closely defined group around a medieval well head, which is separately listed. The design was based on the award-winning prototype at Poplar Meadow, with modifications to the roof and porches as Weeks's ideas evolved. The group at the Hamlet replaced a group of dilapidated estate cottages thought incapable of 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 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.