White Fox Lodge

TQ 81 NE 24/10030

UDIMORE White Fox Lodge

II

Private house. 1964 by John Schwerdt and Partners, Philip Pain job architect, for Sidney and Joan Horniblow. Brick, painted white, whose flat roof has deep timber-lined eaves. Single storey. Cross-shaped plan, with walls extending into garden and with pergolas to living room. Chimneys to living room and boiler room. Blind entrance front, with main entrance door in angle. Kitchen entrance and garage at southern end of long facade. Living and dining rooms on garden front with full-height windows; those to the bedrooms with patio doors and smaller windows still to kitchen and service flat; all with aluminium frames. INTERIOR. Plan centred on entrance hall, which has full-height glazing giving on to sculpture fountain framed by walls: it is external but can only be appreciated from within. All rooms with varnished timber ceilings, as extended out to form eaves, enhancing the unity between inside and outside that is a feature of this house. From this radiates four arms, one semi-open plan giving on to a study and living room separated by central half walls; study with fitted bookcases and living room with fireplace. To north, master bedroom wing with fully-fitted and carefully detailed full-height cupboards that are a feature of the house and which are found also in the dressing room and the guest wing which runs to the east. Both these wings with bathrooms tiled in white mosaic and with original fittings. The dining room to the south is a more formal and enclosed space, with beyond it a fully fitted kitchen and utility area. To rear of kitchen entrance and garage is a service flat, with simpler interiors, and boiler room. Sidney Horniblow was a noted advertising manager and avid collector; the house was deliberately designed in a low-key modern style to house his works of art. The house is cleverly integrated with the surrounding garden {designed by Sylvia Crowe} by means of its spur walls and pergolas. John Schwerdt trained in Brighton and established a successful career in Lewes; this was his most ambitious and successful work, for an exceptional client. He persuaded Horniblow to study the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the house has some affinity with the latter's work of the 1930's as well as with that of the Dutch de Stijl movement and Mies van der Rohe's 'design for a brick country house' of 1924. The result is an usual and exceptionally carefully detailed design, that was never published in the Horniblows' lifetime.

Listing NGR: TQ8938419572