Noah'S House Boathouse

SU 88 NE 2/10010

COOKHAM Noah's House Boathouse

II*

Boathouse and workshop,with music room or spare bedroom over. 1930, by Colin Lucas for his father; built by Lucas Lloyd and Co. Monolithic reinforced thin wall construction, rendered and painted white, with flat roof which forms overhanging hood. Modern Movement style. Single storey with first-floor music room. Long rectangular block with curved workshop at landward end and rectangular music room to river. Eleven windows. Plain entrance to boathouse via the workshop. First floor entrance to music room approached by double flight external steps with curved monolithic balustrades: large segmental arched balustrade at base of steps. Boathouse windows form a strip running the whole length of the building beneath the overhanging hood and have frameless glazing puttied directly into the rebated concrete mullions. The music room has similar windows to the river and over the boathouse roof. Opposite the entrance French doors give on to a small balcony with a monolithic balustrade. Simple double opening to river, with hood. Noah's house, now much altered and extended, and its boathouse were the first reinforced concrete buildings in Britain in the Modern Movement style. Colin Lucas, the son of a motor car designer, determined to understand how the new Modem Movement style should be constructed in the appropriate material - concrete - and on leaving university set up his own building company. This is his oldest surviving work and first in this medium. The system of rebating the windows directly into the concrete was also innovatory, and was much repeated by architects in the 1950s and 1960s. Lucas went on to form a partnership with Amyas Connell and Basil Ward, with whom he built some of the most exciting modern houses of the 1930s, and then to the London County Council where he supervised the construction of its pioneering Alton West Estate. Sources: Architect and Building News, 19 August 1932, pp.223-7. Architectural Association Journal, October 1956, pp.94-115. Muriel Emanuel, ed. Contemporary Architects, 1984, pp.482-3 Dennis Sharp, ed. Connell Ward Lucas, 1994.

Listing NGR: SU8775186899