Garden Ground

Private house and doctor's consulting rooms. Designed between 1949 and 1951, built in 1951-2, by architect Robert Townsend for his own use.

The building is constructed of brick, laid in Flemish and stretcher bond with timber panelling and full-height glazed openings, all beneath a shallow pitched copper-covered roof with deep eaves. Thick framed timber windows and doors feature exposed brick and polished marine plywood panelling.

The plan is single storey throughout, except for a higher central double-height living room. The design is essentially linear, with two wings arranged around a square diagonally-set central living area, itself backing onto a large central stack. Kitchen and bathrooms are located to the rear of the stack, lit from above by an asymmetrical lantern. The central living area, accessed from the entrance hall, is divided into dining room and living room by a low brick wall with timber shelving above, terminated by a pier. The fireplace comprises a massive brick stack supported on a lintel of vertically set bricks on a diagonally shaped pier, with a hearth backed in light-coloured fire bricks. Above this is the pyramidal roof ceiling, horizontally boarded. Above the entrance hall and adjacent to the stack stands a large asymmetrically shaped vertically planked timber hardwood screen. The kitchen is separated from the dining area by double-faced cupboards finished in polished plywood. The east wing contains the former consulting and waiting rooms and dispensary of the doctor's facility, together with a lofted children's play area above the garage. The west range comprises a suite of four bedrooms accessed from a rear corridor, the northernmost being the principal bedroom with a coved plywood ceiling. Lesser rooms are panelled with plywood and feature fitted cupboards and shelves.

Garden Ground was built during the period of stringent building materials rationing between 1945 and 1954, which constrained both material availability and building costs. Townsend had worked with Frederick Gibbard and F R S Yorke before the Second World War and trained at, and remained closely associated with, the Architectural Association throughout his career. He set up practice locally in the late 1940s, and a series of private dwelling commissions followed. Between 1949 and 1953, he designed a sequence of four houses in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire—at Gastard, Corsham, Banbury, Great Somerford and Durrington—all bearing the unmistakable influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly the planning and ethos of his earlier Prairie Houses and the Usonian Houses of the late 1930s and 1940s. These domestic commissions were notably different from the industrial buildings that would characterise his later career. Townsend is chiefly recognised as one of the key innovators of British factory design in the mid-twentieth century. By 1957 he had designed the weaving shed at the Royal Wilton Carpet Factory (demolished in the 1980s) and followed this with the Silhouette Factory at Market Drayton in 1959-60 (now demolished).