Harbour Meadow

Private house with attached covered way and garage, designed 1938–40 by Peter Moro and Richard Llewelyn Davies, with Gordon Cullen, for Mr and Mrs Tawse.

The building is constructed with a concrete frame clad in brick, with an exposed natural stone screen facing the long approach drive, and features a flat roof. The plan is Z-shaped, arranged around a centrally-placed entrance hall, with principal rooms overlooking the sea and service and guest rooms positioned along the drive front. The house is two storeys with a large balcony terrace to the sea-facing wing, accessed via steps opposite the main entrance. Further steps from a first-floor sea-facing terrace lead to the roof. The entrance is set in a small patio formed by the building's geometry and a long covered way of steel posts and timber that links the house to a double garage set at right angles, which screens the drive from the gardens.

The windows have been renewed and are not of special interest. The original windows had narrower profiles and were imported from Switzerland, where Moro had trained. The replacements have been inset into the original openings, minimising impact on the original design. The main entrance is through a glazed screen to the entrance hall, set in the angle of the house, with a projecting canopy over the entrance and a timber beam canopy over the first floor above.

The natural stone screen facing the approach drive conceals doors to the kitchen and boot room on either side—the day-to-day entrances. Between them is a large framed window. On the seaward wing, a large window is set into a slanting concrete frame that forms a balustrade to the balcony terrace above. This window is double-glazed, functioning as a small indoor conservatory to the former morning room. Along the sea-facing front, the house is set back within its frame, which creates a plinth or narrow patio at ground floor with a balcony above. The set-back brickwork is a contrasting darker shade, appearing yellow when inspected in 2000. Full-height glazing faces the living room beyond. The dining room features a curious window facing the sea with yellow glass and an internal neo-Baroque surround decorated with urns, shells and swags, echoing the classical motifs at Highpoint II, where Moro and Cullen had worked. Beside it is a long window in a projecting frame, creating a very deep internal window sill. Long, narrow horizontal windows serve the kitchen and first-floor corridors on the service range, their repetitive square and rectangular forms contrasting with the varied planes of the principal elevations.

The interior features a square entrance hall with a dramatic curved, sweeping Hollywood-style cantilevered open-tread staircase with a tapered and slightly fluted newel. The area by the front door is curbed for plant displays; the original square-patterned artificial stone floor extends beyond. The principal rooms to the left comprise a suite originally used as morning room, living room and dining room. The morning room to the east has timber-lined columns with strong entasis and tapering plain tops and bases, reminiscent of those used by Moro at the Royal Festival Hall in 1949–51, framing a wall of shelving. Fireplaces in this room and the living room have been renewed. The living room is notable for its mixture of high, light open space served by full-height windows, contrasted with a lower inglenook under timber beams, its entrance supported on another timber-clad tapered column. Although the fireplace has been renewed, the other inglenook features are well preserved, including the mantlepiece framed by radio/gramophone speakers and a built-in leather settee terminating in a cupboard. Broad timber window sills serve all these rooms, particularly the dining room. The boot room contains a long set of built-in blocks, shown on published plans, presumably for drying boots upside down. The kitchen and corridors feature many built-in cupboards, as do the guest bedrooms and maid's rooms in the entrance wing. The former first-floor suite of bedroom with flanking dressing rooms for Mr and Mrs Tawse has been remodelled and no longer retains features of interest.

From the balcony, steps lead up to the roof, and of steel construction, back to the front door. Beside this staircase is a built-in planter and seat. The covered way and double garage, constructed of steel, timber and brick, were conceived by Moro as a means of screening the garden and making the house 'sit comfortably' in the flat landscape.

Peter Moro (1911–99) emigrated to Britain in 1936 to avoid Nazi persecution, and went on to have an acclaimed if limited architectural practice in England, later specialising in theatre design. This is his first building, designed in collaboration with Richard Llewelyn Davies, then still a student and through whom he met Mr and Mrs Tawse. Moro described the commission as 'a fairy tale', and one that saved him from deportation. The Z-shaped plan was evolved to separate parents from children and servants, defining the seaward and landward-facing halves of the house. In its use of brick and natural stone, the building anticipates the 1950s revival of natural materials in modern domestic architecture. The use of framing as a device for highlighting key features, while found on a smaller scale in the work of other émigré architects in England such as Ernst Freud, became a distinctly 1950s device brought to popular attention by the Festival of Britain. The internal timberwork, reminiscent of Lubetkin's Highpoint II and closely anticipating Moro's interiors at the Royal Festival Hall, renders this house particularly remarkable. Cullen was brought in to help Moro complete the building after war was declared in 1939 and Davies left for Ireland; Moro himself faced difficulties travelling in what became a restricted zone. Cullen's 'architectural joke' of the window serves to link the ideas incubated in Lubetkin and Tecton's Highpoint II with their post-war realisation. Although somewhat altered, this is a rare architectural textbook of progressive ideas—ideas not realised in other houses because of the war, but which can be seen scattered throughout the limited public building permitted thereafter.