Little Wakestone, Fittleworth, West Sussex

Summary

House, possibly dating to the C17, altered in several phases, including in the late C19 or early C20; extended in 1962-1963 and about 1965 by Bill Howell of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis.

Description

House, possibly dating to the C17, altered in several phases, including in the late C19 or early C20; extended in 1962-1963 and about 1965 by Bill Howell of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis.

MATERIALS: stone with red brick dressings and cedar timber frame. The roofs are covered in red clay tiles. Doors and windows are timber.

PLAN: the early house faces south-east and is of two bays over two storeys; it has a hipped roof and a large external stack to the south-west. An extra bay was added in about 1965 to the north-east. There are two rooms on the ground floor with a stair to the rear of one of them, and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor. The later bay provides an extension to one of the upper rooms and a garden store below.

To the rear of the early house a glazed link projects to the north-west, connecting it with a later wing which is roughly square in plan; both link and wing date to 1962-1963. The fall of the ground is such that the first floor of the wing is at the same height as the ground floor of the early house. The wing comprises a living and dining area, open to the underside of the hipped roof, a galley kitchen and a stair leading to the ground floor which contains two bedrooms, a dressing room, a bathroom and a WC. The wing has two chimneys, one serving the fireplace in the living room and one originally serving a coal-fired Aga.

EXTERIOR: the front elevation of the early house faces to the south-east, but the entrance front of the whole ensemble is now to the south-west, where the sloping topography of the site and the formal relationship between old and new is clearly expressed.

The entrance is central to the composition, reached up a flight of steps and set within a short, glazed link with a pitched, tiled roof. To the east of the link is the flank of the old house, vernacular in character and dominated by its substantial external brick and stone stack; to the west is the later wing, executed in a similar palette of stone, brick, timber, glass and reclaimed clay tiles, but introducing contemporary details and elevational treatment.

The early house is of stone with red brick quoins and mullioned casement windows with square leaded lights. It has undergone several phases of remodelling and has had two large buttresses built against its back wall and its flank wall to the north-east (the latter now enclosed within the later bay).

The south-east front has a central plank door, to the left of which is a shallow square bay window beneath a timber-framed, jettied, oriel with herringbone brick infill; this arrangement probably dates to the late C19 or early C20. To the right of the door is a large single-storey bay window with a hipped roof; an earlier version of this feature may have been part of the C19/C20 phase, but it was remodelled to its current form with the addition of a third bay of stone and brick at the north-east end of the house in the 1960s. The flank elevation of this later bay has a timber-framed oriel window in a style to match the later wing of the house.

The later wing has blind, loadbearing, stone walls with brick dressings to north-west and south-west, the latter where the link connects it to the rear of the old cottage. The principal front and back elevations are to the north-east and south-west. At ground floor these are also of stone, with brick dressings around window and door openings. Above, the first-floor elevations are slightly jettied and are of timber and glass, a mixture of full-height windows held in timber frames and smaller windows set within walls clad in horizontal timber boards. The first floor and roof are carried on projecting pairs of split beams which clasp storey-height timber columns, holding them just clear of the face of the building.

INTERIOR: some of the early structural members of the old house are exposed within its rooms, also revealing evidence of structural intervention. The stair and roof appear to have been rebuilt in the C20. The character of a historic interior survives, with some early joinery and an open fireplace on the ground floor.

The interior of the later wing is largely as built, characterised by timber boarded ceilings and exposed structure. The main living area is open to the underside of the roof and walls are either heavily glazed or faced in exposed brick or stone. In some areas, specifically the kitchen and within the stairwell and ground floor lobby, the timber and brick have been painted.

The floor beams are supported across the width of the structure by four full-height timber columns around the stair. The partition walls on the ground floor are of a light, sand coloured brick laid on edge, the frogs exposed in the smaller of the two bedrooms (a device used by the practice elsewhere, such as at University of Birmingham’s Ashley Building, listed Grade II, NHLE 1234299).

At both ground and first floors the depth of the beams is infilled at the wall-head by strips of glazing, allowing in extra light and emphasising the extent to which the structure passes through the envelope of the building.

History

Prior to the mid-1960s, Little Wakestone comprised a small, two-bay stone cottage, thought to date to the C17, with alterations probably dating to the C19 and/or early-C20.

It was bought by Air Vice-Marshal and Mrs Ramsay Rae in the 1950s. Mrs Ramsay Rae’s brother was the architect Bill Howell (1922-1974) of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis (HKPA), so it was to him that the couple turned to design an extension which would substantially enlarge the footprint of the house and turn it into a family home.

The brief required the extended house to provide four bedrooms, a dressing room and a playroom, in addition to the normal domestic rooms. The extension was to be considerably larger than the original house, not just in terms of floor area, but also height, to meet bye-law requirements for floor-to-ceiling heights. The challenge was to arrive at a design that respected the character of the existing house and the landscape in which it stood, whilst being legible as a new addition and avoiding a ‘cottagey’ idiom, as Howell phrased it.

The solution was a new wing, roughly square in plan, situated a short distance to the rear of the house. Old and new parts were connected by a raised glazed link, built across a pre-existing terrace which was retained. The link also provided a new entrance to the house. The steep fall of the land ensured the roof of the new wing sat well below that of the original house, despite being taller, and the ground floor of the old house continued through the glazed link to the first floor of the new wing. The new wing provided a large living area open to the roof, with bedrooms tucked into the ground floor beneath.

Materials were matched to the old house: the same local stone, local Billingshurst brick, and reclaimed roofing tiles. Cedar was introduced for the first-floor framing with the intention that it should be left to weather naturally.

The main extension was completed in late 1963, but a couple of years later, when Howell’s mother moved to join her daughter’s family at Little Wakestone, the house was extended further with the addition of a bay to the north of the old house. This extension was also designed by Howell and, as with the new wing, was built by Pat Creighton Smith, a local builder from Wisborough Green.

Bill Howell, John Killick and Stan Amis met as students at the Architectural Association. They went on to work together as graduates at the London County Council architect’s department where, together with John Partridge, they made their reputation on the Roehampton Lane estate (now known as Alton West, 1954-61, listed at Grade II*, NHLE 1466474). The four architects moonlighted on various competitions and private commissions before forming the practice of Howell Killick Partridge & Amis in 1961.

The practice is perhaps best known for its work in the public, education and arts sectors, including higher education buildings for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, amongst others. A number of their buildings are now listed, some at high grades. The partners’ shared ethos produced a distinctive design language derived from expressed structure, highly-modelled surfaces and a refined use of materials.

Howell coined the term ‘vertebrate’ buildings, to describe those in which structure is revealed, internally and externally. HKPA’s adoption of this concept was rooted in an understanding of, and interest in, traditional architecture. It is expressed across a number of buildings in the HKPA oeuvre, from the massive concrete URS building at the University of Reading (1970-72, listed Grade II, NHLE 1435127) to the pavilion-like Combination room at Downing College, Cambridge (1967-60), adjacent to William Wilkins’ Classical hall of 1874-76 (listed Grade I). This idea is manifest also in the extension to Little Wakestone, where its expression, together the choice of materials and detailing, responds sensitively to the vernacular context of the site. The extension won a Civic Trust Award in 1965.

Reasons for Listing

Little Wakestone, a cottage with probable C17 origins, extended in 1962-1963 by Bill Howell of HKPA, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* as a vernacular house, its well-preserved character reflecting regional building materials and traditional construction techniques;

* for the intrinsic interest of its creative and sensitively conceived extension which reinterprets the local vernacular with modernist detailing and spatial treatment.

Historic interest:

* as a building of multiple phases, including an extension by the architect Bill Howell.

External Links

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