Numbers 2, 3 And 4 And Linking Painted Walls

Three linked cottages commissioned in 1950 and built between 1952 and 1956 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 in 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. The scheme comprises a mirrored pair of L-shaped two-bedroom cottages built in 1952-5, linked by a wall that now conceals garages. These are connected to a further smaller cottage added in 1955-6 and subsequently extended by Weeks in the same architectural idiom. All three have large shed areas for storing tools and muddy boots.

The main houses are based on a rectangular footprint 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. The cottages feature black timber doors with glazed panels to the front doors and solid doors to the sheds. Timber windows are painted black with opening lights painted white. Door-height vertical strip windows flank the front doors, and large closely mullioned windows light the first-floor stores. The interiors are not of special architectural interest.

Number 4 bears a plaque of the West Suffolk County Council Architectural Award for 1957. 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 after Davies met Lord Rothschild whilst studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. The linking wall defined a sense of enclosure, from which the orthogonal plans developed. The mirrored pair of larger cottages were built as a prototype for a scheme to rebuild most of the village.

The judge for the West Suffolk County Council Award, Sir Leslie Martin, noted that the cottages showed 'what interesting architecture can be produced by the use of traditional materials' and that 'the imaginative use of traditional form has produced houses that are advanced in design. They provide an outstanding lesson in town planning. They demonstrate how a pair, a group, or even a street of individual houses can achieve the unity which has been common in the past, but which has been completely lost in most present-day developments' (RIBA Journal, December 1957).

The smaller cottage introduced modifications and improvements, including a modified ridge detail. Though 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 parallel ideas, developed by Bill Howell and John Partridge, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson, and John Voelcker, were widely published and influential in these architects' later low-rise high-density schemes for urban areas. The development demonstrates how the pragmatic modernism of Rushbrooke became a powerful force in housing design in the later 1960s and 1970s.