Lodge Style

Detached house on Shaft Road, Combe Down, designed in 1909 by Charles Voysey. Built in limestone ashlar with a stone Cotswold slate roof.

The house is arranged as a courtyard plan with an entrance porch tower at the north-west corner and a garage wing projecting from the north side. It is single storey throughout, with leaded casement windows featuring moulded stone mullions and four-centred heads.

The entrance front presents a broad, plain tower with a wide gabled stone porch over a pointed arch with triple wave mould, rising from a high plain splayed plinth. The door is studded plank with decorative strap hinges. To the left are three and two-light windows beneath a moulded drip course stopped to a carved angel; to the right, the drip course carries a shield bearing the date 1909. Further left stands a lower unit with a crenellated parapet and a return wall, also crenellated, with a plank door in a four-centred head and garage door. The remainder of the building has a steep roof on sprocketed eaves.

The right return incorporates a porch tower with a clasping buttress to the right and a projecting porch buttress to the left, with a single light at first floor and three-light below, both with stopped drips. The main range features an oriel with one:two:twelve-light fenestration under a stone roof with moulded eaves and deep stone bracket, plus single and four-light windows. The outer gabled end has a raking buttress flush with the return face and taken up to eaves height, a characteristic Voysey touch. The south front has a ventilation slit in the gable over an oriel with one:two:one-lights. To the right is a wide arched opening to a deep open lobby with three steps up and three down, with plank doors in the rear wall to the corridor. To the right are three and four-light windows and a low arched door, returned to a hipped end. The east front is more restrained, with four windows under plain square heads, and a hipped return. Four large square chimney stacks are placed prominently, each with a plain cornice and high upper stage with flat cap on vertical slits.

The interior features a central courtyard with a stone table at its centre. Dining and drawing rooms with segmental vaulted ceilings and large open hearths occupy the west range, bedrooms are to the east and south, and services along the north range. The interior was not inspected at the time of listing.

The house was designed for T. Sturge Cotterell, Bath Alderman and owner of the Combe Down quarries. Just as Ralph Allen's Prior Park gave the quarry-owner an opportunity to display the quality of his stone, Lodge Style served as a flamboyant display of masonry. The building's exposed position on a ridge led to the compact, low design which emphasised warmth and enclosure, with interior, exterior and setting cleverly integrated. The house fuses Voysey's characteristically distinctive touch with historicist and vernacular references inspired by the owner's Oxford college, Merton. It remains a notable private house of its period and an unusual addition to the Bath locality, being one of very few relatively recent houses in the area by an architect of international standing. Voysey's drawings are held in the British Architectural Library.