Number 5 And Attached Walls

This is an estate cottage commissioned in 1950 and built between 1960 and 1963 by Llewelyn Davies and Weeks, with John Weeks as job architect and Michael Huckstepp as executive architect, for Lord Rothschild. It is constructed of white-painted brick on a black-painted brick plinth, with a slate roof largely treated as monopitches and short stacks. The building is single-storey with a storage loft and a large integral shed area for tools and muddy boots.

The main house is based on a rectangular form, 56 feet wide by 33 feet deep, with a central spine from which sections were cut away to create a picturesque, yet coherent composition. This is the last house designed in the group. It features black timber doors, the front door with glazed panels, and a solid door leading to the shed. Timber windows are painted black, with white opening lights. Large, closely-mullioned windows illuminate the first-floor storage spaces. Interiors are not of special interest.

The black and white painted idiom is characteristic of Suffolk, employing traditional materials, but the overall planning and design are modern. The commission was drawn from a previous association between Llewelyn Davies and Lord Rothschild while the former was at Trinity College, Cambridge. The design was based on a prototype at Poplar Meadow. While built to a higher specification than public housing, Rushbrooke exhibited a well-planned ‘house type’ and strong visual character. The development broke with conventional post-war rural housing imagery and anticipated ideas of CIAM, an international research group focused on modern architecture and housing. These ideas, and those of architects Bill Howell, John Partridge, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson and John Voelcker, were later influential in urban housing design. The scheme demonstrates how a skilled architect, working with an ordinary brief and modest budget, can create a strong sense of place, which was notably admired in the context of contemporary criticism of housing developments.